


all my skeletons out for the taking

by 136108



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Azula (Avatar) Redemption, Azula Wins the Agni Kai, Fire Lord Azula, Fire Siblings Bonding, Gen, I Wanted to Write an AU Where Azula Wins the Agni Kai and Keeps Zuko Around, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Ozai (Avatar) Being a Terrible Parent, Zuko just wants his sister to be happy, Zuko's servants have all adopted him at this point, and accidentally becomes Fire Lord in the process, because it's what she deserves, oopsies, so i did
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:53:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24747124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/136108/pseuds/136108
Summary: Azula wins the Agni Kai, and the playing field shifts.
Relationships: Azula & The Gaang (Avatar), Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), The Gaang & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 207
Kudos: 683
Collections: A:tla, AtLA <50k fics to read





	1. Chapter One

He drifted into consciousness sluggishly, and his senses filtered into his awareness one by one.

The most all-encompassing of these was the dull ache pervading throughout his entire body. It settled across his skin and sank down into his bones with what felt like a physical weight, pressing down against his chest so that every breath became a battle. It peaked into a sharper, stronger pain somewhere beneath his ribs, and tugged with every shallow inhale that he took.

There was also sound; it was muted at first, as if his head had been submerged underwater, but then it gradually rose in volume until he could identify the sounds of rustles and murmurs around him. He could make out several voices, speaking in low tones, on all sides. But he couldn’t recognize any of them.

Little bits and pieces of before were coming back to him—of plans for stopping an armada of war balloons, and plans for ending the life of his own father.

Plans for fighting his little sister to the death for a throne he didn’t even _want_.

Azula.

His next inhale was even more difficult than the last.

Fighting her had been akin to having to watch a train wreck in slow motion. It was something that he had dreaded doing, though he had known it had to be done, because she was still his little sister. No amount of banishment and treason and cruelty could change that. He had cursed his father, a thousand times before, for committing them to a war that had brought about nothing but ruin. But in that moment, facing off against a desperate fourteen-year-old girl with a sneer that didn’t reach her eyes, Zuko had truly _hated_ him.

For turning his children into weapons—one intentionally, the other not.

For pitting them against each other.

It had been impossible, going into the fight, to even think about Azula dying. No matter how dangerous she had proven to be, and no matter how many people she had terrorized and killed, Zuko had just _known_ that he wouldn’t have it in him.

There had been no glory in their fight. No sense of victory, or of triumph.

Only tragedy.

…He couldn’t remember the Agni Kai itself. What with how much pain he was in, he wondered if Katara had needed to finish the job for him. He thought he could faintly remember lightning, meant for him but not directed at him, and then—

Nothing.

Where was Katara?

Slowly, though it felt like he was fighting against the weight of a thousand komodo rhinos, he forced his eyes open.

He was met with the familiar surroundings of his room at the palace—that of the crown prince of the Fire Nation—and blinked. Then he blinked again, and again, and finally conceded that he was probably not dreaming. That this was his reality.

Though he had known, logically, that the plan for him to take the throne meant he would eventually have to live in the palace once more, it was a completely different thing to look around and to see it everywhere. The bed was too large, and too soft; the fire nation insignias on the curtains felt like they were pressing in on him; the crimson-red silk covering every available surface looked as if it had been soaked in blood. These traditional, royal decorations were something that he had once associated with his childhood and the life at court, one that he had so desperately wished to return to. But now, all he could remember when he glanced around was the emptiness and _guilt_ that had wracked him in the weeks spanning from his betrayal of his uncle to the eclipse.

“Your Highness,” came a voice, and Zuko turned towards it, glad for the distraction.

A woman, middle-aged, was perched in a chair at his bedside, clothed in the plain but unmistakable uniform of the Royal Healer. Zuko had been certain he’d heard multiple voices, but she was the only person left in the room. As he studied her more carefully, though he was too exhausted to muster up anything beyond faint surprise, he knew for a fact that she had not been here when Zuko had last visited the palace.

He narrowed his eyes.

Then he opened his mouth, to try to ask what was going on and where Katara was. But the sound that left his throat sounded more like the strangled croak of a dying wood frog, and he abruptly slammed his mouth shut. His eye twitched at the pain of what had felt like his throat rubbing itself raw, but he managed to avoid a grimace.

The woman’s face remained impassive, but she reached behind herself for a cup, and brought it up to his lips.

Zuko was not about to let himself be fed like a child, and tried to take the cup and hold it for himself. But his limbs refused to obey him. Brow furrowing, he tried again, with more intent, but his fingers didn’t even twitch.

“Drink, Highness,” the woman said calmly. “Then I can explain your situation.”

Still suspicious, and barely holding back panic, Zuko eyed her warily, and sipped. The cup contained tea that slid smoothly down his parched throat and settled coolly in his stomach. It almost reminded him of Uncle’s “medicinal” teas, except that its smell and taste was nowhere near as offensive.

Uncle.

Zuko sipped faster, eager to figure out what had happened to _everyone_ , not just him. Had Katara taken down Azula? Had Sokka, Suki, and Toph successfully taken down the war balloons in time? Had Aang defeated Ozai? Had Uncle and the others liberated Ba Sing Se?

He had too many questions, and absolutely no answers. Not knowing where any of his friends were—not knowing if any of them were safe, or even _alive_ —left a current of anxiety running through his body. It lay just under the skin, like an itch that he could only reach if he just _knew_.

When he finished, the woman silently refilled the cup, and he drank again. Only once he had finished that as well did she sit back, surveying him critically.

“I am Iyemi, and have been serving as Royal Healer for around a month, now,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’ve only been out for a few days, but I suspect you have neurological and cardiac injuries from your Agni Kai—”

“Where’s Katara?” Zuko interrupted, unable to contain himself anymore. “The waterbender,” he added, when Iyemi only gave him a blank look.

Iyemi gave a long sigh. “She is alive,” she said, “but please allow me to explain your injuries—”

_Alive._

It was vague, but it was better than nothing, and he felt a little bit on the tension he’d been carrying along his shoulders and spine ease away.

“What of the Avatar?” he demanded. “Is there word of him? What about the armada, did they reach the Earth Kingdom? Is Ba Sing Se still under Fire Nation control?”

Iyemi’s lips thinned with disapproval.

“I am not here to give you a play-by-play of the past few days,” she said sternly. “As I mentioned before, your heart has been damaged by the lightning, and it’s likely that it will take a long while to heal. Right now, I’m more concerned with your neurological damage, which I haven’t been able to assess while you were unconscious. If Your Highness would be so kind as to—”

She wasn’t _listening_ to him, and she wasn’t answering any of his questions. Frustration bubbled up in his stomach. He had faith that Katara could heal whatever Iyemi was rambling on about, but he _needed_ to know what had happened with the war while he’d been fighting Azula.

“I will comply with whatever examination and tests you wish,” Zuko interrupted. “But I need to know what’s going on in the world in return.”

It had only been a few minutes since he’d awaken, but Iyemi already looked like he had aged her by ten years. She leaned forward in her chair, a hard glint to her eyes.

“Fine,” she said sharply. “Ozai was defeated, and the Fire Nation has lost Ba Sing Se to the rebels. I will not answer any more questions until I have been able to determine how much of your brain was affected by the lightning.”

Zuko nodded dumbly. His mind was elsewhere.

Iyemi had just dropped two huge bombs on his head.

The first, and most difficult to process, was that Aang had gone up against his father and had _won_. Zuko had possessed a near-complete faith in Aang, despite his moral dilemma at what had to be done, so it wasn’t so much that he’d been triumphant. It was his destiny, after all.

No, it was mostly the fact that his father had always existed as a towering, invincible figure in Zuko’s life. Even his earliest memories, though devoid of his father himself, were steeped with his expectations and his threats. He’d admired him so much that he’d been willing to chase down a fairy tale for _years_ after he’d publicly burned off half of his face. And during all of those years, he’d spent so long turning any anger inwards into himself, making himself a failure, to avoid tarnishing his image of his father. To justify how desperately he wanted his respect and his love. Now, even though he’d come to see how flawed and _evil_ he was, Ozai was still the Fire Lord, the Phoenix King. Zuko’s boogeyman.

And now he was gone.

Dead, because there had been no other way.

It shook him more than he had expected and far more than he was willing to admit. Even hearing of the liberation of Ba Sing Se—a huge military victory, which must have been an incredible triumph for Uncle—seemed to pale in comparison.

“—Your Highness,” Iyemi said, and when he snapped back to attention, she had one eyebrow raised. “I need your full attention for the following questions, please.”

The tests were incredibly boring, and it was difficult to try to pay attention when his mind was still reeling and he still had so many unanswered questions. Iyemi asked him basic questions about who he was, and where he was, and how much of the past few days and few years he was able to remember. Zuko answered all of her questions with ease, except for the ones about the Agni Kai, but she acted like that was completely expected.

Then she started laying two fingers gently against different parts of his skin and asking him to report when he felt contact. It remained boring all the way until she rested her hand against his right arm.

“I—I can’t feel it,” he said, and the words rang out into the silence in the room.

Iyemi simply hummed, face unreadable, and moved further down towards his wrist.

He could no longer trust himself to speak, and just shook his head. There was a sickening, sinking feeling in his stomach, as if someone had reached into his insides and grabbed a handful and _twisted_. He suddenly felt almost faint.

His left arm produced the same result.

“You’ve only just awoken,” Iyemi said, then, as if she could hear Zuko’s hammering pulse from where she sat. “It’s entirely possible that the damage will only remain at its worst for the first few days of your recovery.”

Zuko nodded, and tried to cling to her words, even though they felt slightly like a lie when she tapped against both of his legs and he felt nothing.

“Can you move your fingers at all?” she asked, then, and Zuko wanted to scream at her that he couldn’t feel his fucking hands, he couldn’t bend, of course he couldn’t fucking _move_ them—

His pinky twitched, and he stared at it as if it were an alien creature, eyes wide.

“Do it again,” Iyemi commanded, and he did. “Other side.”

And he did.

His head shot up to look at her, desperate for her opinion, because that was something, right? And something was better than nothing, and if he wasn’t completely paralyzed then it didn’t matter if he was having issues feeling touch because that could—that _would_ —come back, eventually. Screwing up his face in concentration, he tried his best to wiggle his toes, and succeeded in making his feet twitch, ever-so-slightly.

“Those are much better signs,” Iyemi said, and all of the air whooshed out of Zuko’s lungs in a sigh of relief so big he felt that it had taken a piece of his soul with it. “You don’t seem to have lost any of your mental functions, at least, and your nerve pathways aren’t completely fried. You’ll likely be able to regain a lot of your motor function going forwards.”

“That’s good, right?” Zuko asked, desperately. “And I’ll eventually be able to feel everything again?”

“Having conscious motor control makes your likelihood of regaining sensation in those limbs much higher, yes,” Iyemi confirmed. “I won’t falsely promise that a full recovery is guaranteed, but your prospects could have been much worse, considering the sheer voltage you were hit with.”

Zuko quieted as she turned back around to write something on a sheet of paper resting on his nightstand. His thoughts turned to his sister.

His suspicion that Azula had hit him with lightning during the battle had been all but confirmed by Iyemi, but that still left him with no information about where Azula was. He had trusted Katara to do everything in her power to take her down without harming her, but a small, niggling voice in the back of his head wouldn’t stop reminding him that water and electricity didn’t mix very well. It would have been all too easy for either Katara or Azula to be grievously injured by the interaction of their elements.

But Katara was alive, Iyemi had told him.

She hadn’t said anything about his little sister.

“What of Azula?” he asked, abandoning his efforts to try to twitch his fingers again. “You didn’t tell me what happened to her.”

Iyemi’s pen stopped moving for a split-second, before it resumed writing. From his angle, he couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see what sort of expression she was wearing—

“Asking about me already, I see!” cooed a voice, and Zuko’s blood turned to ice in his veins.

He turned his head as quickly as he could, though just trying to lift it off of the pillows felt like a nearly insurmountable task. He hoped against all hopes that he was wrong, that when he looked up, he would see Katara, or even Iroh, just not _her_ —

“Hello, Zuzu,” Azula grinned. She tilted her head so that the light reflected off of the golden crown of flames adorning her hair, and Zuko’s eyes widened with realization. His heart, which had been fluttering weakly to begin with, ground to a halt.

Blood red lips curled into a sneer of triumph.

“Don’t worry, I forgive you for missing my coronation,” Azula told him gleefully, relishing in his horror. “Now, why don’t you show some respect for your new Fire Lord?”

* * *

If General Banzan didn’t stop hemming and hawing about sending their troops through Gaoling, even though it made _sense_ to go through there in order to reach Omashu—well, Azula had garnered a reputation for burning those who defied her, and she hadn’t yet decided whether or not she was feeling particularly merciful that day.

“Dearest General,” she said. Her tone was so sickly-sweet that all of the Generals kneeling around the large map on the floor visibly shivered. “Might I remind you that we wouldn’t need to engage in active combat in the Earth Kingdom if _your_ war balloons hadn’t been commandeered—and by mere teenagers, no less?”

General Banzan fell silent so quickly it amused her. She could see his fear in the lines of his face and the beads of sweat at his brow; could almost see it in the air, hovering like a cloud above the war council’s heads.

Good.

They had every reason to fear her.

Azula uncrossed her legs and stood, gracefully descending to the Generals’ level. Her arms were poised perfectly behind her back as she strolled behind the lines of kneeling men.

“I think all of you would do well to remember that it was _my_ planning and execution that won us Ba Sing Se,” she said with a thin, fake veneer of calm, “and _my_ planning that would have neutralized the Earth Kingdom.”

She stopped, directly behind General Banzan, and his shoulders tensed.

“But it was _your_ oversight that lost us Ba Sing Se,” she hissed, “and _your_ mismanagement that left the Earth Kingdom still standing.”

Banzan threw himself forward into a formal bow, while the other Generals watched silently. None of them were willing to risk themselves by standing with him, and he knew it.

“Please accept my sincere apologies, Fire Lord Azula,” he spluttered. “I meant no disrespect, and I will of course execute your final decision without hesitation.”

Azula pretended to inspect her nails, just to drag his terror out for a few more moments. Really, if she had wanted someone to second-guess her decisions, she would have dragged her brother into the throne room with her, crippled legs and all.

Her lip curled as she allowed herself, for a brief moment, to think about Zuko.

His face had looked _so_ lovely when he’d seen her—especially the way his blood had drained from his face in the exact mixture of disbelief and fear that she’d hoped for. His eyes had widened in horror so comically that she had, for a brief moment, wondered if they were going to pop out from their sockets and dangle limply against his cheeks.

They hadn’t, but then Iyemi had started talking about his injuries. And Zuko had just _laid_ there, mouth slightly open, as if the shock had stripped him of his last few brain cells and had taken his ability to speak with it.

Azula was used to rage, and frustration, and spluttering indignation from him. But she found that she was quite partial to the change of pace.

And Iyemi’s report had practically made her day. She’d been careful when she’d shocked him, and had even held herself back—not from making it hurt, exactly, but from frying him completely. It would have been no fun to keep him as prisoner if he’d been rendered a vegetable, after all. She’d provoked him into taking a lightning hit by aiming for the little waterbender peasant, and she’d used it as a prime opportunity to practice her control. She’d been practicing on prisoners of war for weeks, honing her lightning to not just shock but to _damage_. And she’d gotten so close—Zuko’s heart and his sense of touch might have been a little worse for wear, but otherwise he was exactly where she had wanted him: helpless and bedridden, but alive.

It was the icing on the cake that Azula’s strategy had only succeeded because he’d fallen for her trick and had jumped in front of the peasant. It had been an act of stupidity, and of foolishness.

Mother would have called it kindness, came to the front of her mind, unbidden.

She stamped it out instantly, snapped back to attention, and bit back the instinctual rage that flooded her veins any time her mind decided to dredge up that woman. General Banzan was still prostrating himself, the room silent but thick with tension.

“Rise, General,” she drawled, and the sigh of relief was inaudible but was felt, nonetheless. “I am kind enough to provide second chances to those who prove themselves worthy of them. I trust, then, that you will endeavor to become worthy of my mercy.”

“Of course, Fire Lord Azula,” Banzan parroted, nodding almost fervently.

She smiled just a little too widely at him.

“Then our troops _will_ travel through Gaoling, and then Omashu, to attack Ba Sing Se’s southeastern wall,” she announced, taking up one of the pointers and using it to push the appropriate pieces north on the map. She paused.

Her intelligence had told her that Iroh had been part of the party to steal Ba Sing Se out from under them. He was likely still there, serving as a leader.

Maybe, if he was killed, it would make Zuko cry.

Azula hadn’t been able to make him cry in a long time.

“Since I seem to be one of the only competent military leaders remaining,” she continued, putting on a dramatic air of reluctance, “I will be the one to lead the invasion.”

Silence fell once more across the room, but her eyes narrowed, and none of the Generals dared to speak up.

So they _could_ be trained.

“Your Majesty,” came a voice, and Azula whirled around, face contorted in fury, to find whoever had _dared_ —

The High Sage raised his hands placatingly, and Azula cursed silently. Many of the palace workers, including the soldiers and even the Generals, were easily replaceable, and had proven to be quite…flammable. If she made an enemy of the High Sage, however, she risked Agni’s wrath—not that she had ever placed much stock in it anyways, but it meant something in the eyes of the people, and she couldn’t risk them turning against her.

Not when she’d only just ascended the throne.

“Your Majesty, I would implore you to reconsider,” the High Sage said firmly. “Your ascension to power is quite recent, and there is already much unrest within your Nation. It would be unwise to leave the seat of your power so early in your reign.”

The Generals _nodded_ , the traitors, and she ground her teeth in frustration because she knew she couldn’t burn _all_ of them, their years of experience still had some value, but—

But she was being second-guessed at nearly every turn, as if they hadn’t already made it clear enough that they were only loyal to Ozai and that they didn’t trust her. As if she didn’t already _know that_ , as if she hadn’t fired or burned half of the castle’s servants because she couldn’t trust them to serve her food or do her hair because they _didn’t fear her enough—_

“We will reconvene tonight,” she gritted out, before she could do anything drastic, and stormed from the room. Her guards followed her, but at more of a distance than usual.

She suspected it had something to do with the smoke seeping from her palms.

When Azula had been younger, Zuko had always taken her around to all of the secret rooms in the palace. They’d made a game out of sneaking around, until she had stopped playing because Zuko had been better than her somehow and that meant it clearly wasn’t a game worth playing if someone so _useless_ could do it—

Regardless, she and Zuko had found a great deal of secret rooms throughout the palace. Most of them were hidden behind different paintings lining the walls of corridors; most of them were small, and empty. Some of them, however, had clearly been used by Ozai—those rooms had old relics taken from the other Nations during the war, and sometimes, even personal items like letters and photographs.

She, Zuko, and Ozai had been the only ones to know about those rooms.

With Ozai rotting away in prison, and with Zuko too weak to even sit up, that left only her.

So she found herself in one of those rooms without even trying—a room that was cramped, and windowless, but where she was finally, completely, _alone_. As soon as the painting swung shut behind her, and the sounds of her guard trying to catch up to her became muffled, she felt the last bit of tension behind her rib cage ease away, and she could breathe again.

When she looked up, mother was standing right in front of her.

She let out a gasp that father would’ve scolded her for and stumbled backwards, reeling in shock. Even as she tried to get away, mother’s expression grew beseeching, and she reached out with both hands as if she was trying to _touch_ her—

“Get away,” Azula rasped, pressing herself back against the wall.

Mother kept moving forward, and she wanted so badly to _burn_ that sickening expression off her face, but when she blasted bright-blue flames from her fingers they just passed right through her and she kept advancing.

“I love you,” Ursa pleaded, still reaching out to her. Her brows were furrowed with concern, and she looked exactly the way Azula remembered her, with her shining hair and red-painted lips and soft, sad eyes.

Her sad, _lying_ eyes.

“No you don’t,” Azula spat, and she exhaled a tiny tongue of blue flame along with the words. “You think I’m a monster, remember?”

Mother just looked at her sorrowfully. “I love you,” she repeated.

This time she _almost_ sounded like she meant it. But Azula stayed back, plastered against the wall, with her hands out defensively in front of her. Because it was a trick, she knew it was a trick, it had to be, mother had never loved her, not like that—

And, sure enough, right as she was about to embrace her, mother perked up.

“Zuko?” Ursa said softly, gaze slipping away from Azula.

She’d been expecting it, but the sound of it still made her flinch as if she had stabbed her.

“Just _leave,_ like you always do!” she screamed. “I never wanted you anyways, I never needed things that were soft and weak! I’m not like _Zuko!”_

She was clutching at her stomach the way soldiers on the battlefield did when their belly had been slashed open, when they had to use their hands to frantically press their intestines back into their bodies. Azula felt like her sanity was slipping out between her fingers, where her mother had cut her with her words, and she dug her nails into her skin and _screamed._

“Zuko?” Ursa said again, and all of Azula’s screaming couldn’t drown out the concern in her voice and the sheer love in her eyes. She turned away from her without a second thought, and—

Azula snapped.

Her guard waited nervously outside the room for her, and snapped to attention when she stepped out from the tattered wreckage of the painting. They did not ask about the hair spilling out of her topknot, or the smoke rising from her clenched fists, or the scorch marks branching out against the walls from where she stood.

She reached up to push her hair out of her face, and smiled.

They, at least, respected her enough to fear her.


	2. Chapter Two

It took three days for Azula to contact him again.

Most of that time had been spent sleeping. His injuries had wreaked havoc on his energy levels, and he’d found it difficult to stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time. Iyemi had assured him that it was completely normal. That his body was hard at work repairing damaged nerve endings throughout his arms and legs.

Zuko believed her. In the first day alone, he’d regained most of the sensation in his arms and hands, and had been told he was making good progress in terms of recovering his movement as well. Though his muscles had weakened slightly, he had improved enough for Iyemi to start him on some strengthening exercises for his arms.

Even though Zuko would sleep for hours after every session, and though they’d leave him unreasonably sore, he remembered the numbness when he’d first woken up too keenly to begrudge the pain.

Any sensation was better than none.

His legs hadn’t progressed in the way that his arms had, and Iyemi couldn’t seem to explain why. Every morning and evening, she would pick up one leg after another to stretch them—a necessity in order to prevent injury down the line, she had told him.

It had been humiliating, especially the first time, to lie there on his back uselessly while she’d twisted and pulled his legs into different positions. But he had to recover. Whenever he thought about staying this way forever his breathing started to get all panicky and Iyemi had to snap him out of it, so he _had_ to get better, and if that meant stretching twice a day then Zuko swore to Agni that he would grit his teeth and sit through it.

Every time, Iyemi would ask him gently if he could feel her hands, and Zuko would stare up at the ceiling and tell her tersely that no, he couldn’t. At times like that, he had to remind himself firmly that he hadn’t been pried away from his body, and that it was still there. That his legs were still there.

He refused to give in to the fear niggling at the back of his mind, so he never looked down to check.

Then Iyemi would ask him to wiggle his toes. She had the grace, at least, not to say anything when he failed, again and again and _again—_

By the third day, he’d recovered enough to sit up, and could move his arms well enough to feed himself. But he still couldn’t get his toes to so much as twitch, even when he willed it so fiercely that his heart skipped a beat in his chest and his temple beaded with sweat. That morning, after his umpteenth unsuccessful attempt, he’d tried and failed to blink back frustrated tears.

Iyemi either hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t commented on them.

So Zuko had spent most of his time asleep, or helping Iyemi torture his arms into working again, or cursing his legs for failing him. He hadn’t really been left alone to his thoughts, because that required being awake, and all of his waking moments were occupied by Iyemi. Any time he stopped to think about Azula, or Aang, or Uncle, or Katara, or—or any of the world outside his room, really, Iyemi would force his attention back to whatever exercises he was attempting and that would be that.

But then Iyemi let him sleep in that morning, straight through the sunrise, instead of stretching his legs. And when he’d asked her why, she’d told him that Azula wanted him to join her for dinner that night, and that he’d needed to rest in order to have enough energy to make it through.

Of course, it had been impossible to think about sleep after that. By the time evening rolled around, Zuko had spent more hours awake in one day than he had in the past three days altogether.

And now that he’d spent time awake, even though he hadn’t seen Azula in days, he’d found her presence around him constantly. He had seen her influence in the pinched look on Iyemi’s face and in how little she’d actually been allowed to tell him, both about his condition and about the outside world. He’d seen her in the frightened silence of the two servants who’d occasionally come in to wash him and change his clothes. And he’d seen her in the rigid spines and blank stares of the guards who stood, always at attention, just inside the door to his rooms.

Azula hadn’t come to visit him, but her influence had remained, like an afterimage of her presence, suspended around him.

The sheer terror of the palace staff around him had spoken volumes to Azula’s mental state. She had always been cunning and ruthlessly pragmatic, cruel even. And she’d seemed a little more disturbed than usual in their confrontations since Zuko had left to join Aang and the others. But now, it was clear just how deeply her subjects feared her—for her violence, for her volatility, or for both.

So Zuko’s anxiety built throughout the day, and by the time the sun had started to sink in the sky, he was forced to admit that he was scared shitless at the idea of seeing Azula again. But it wasn’t because he thought that his life was in danger.

Admittedly, there had been times in the past few months when she’d screamed that she was going to kill him, and his heart had plunged down through his belly as he’d realized that he _believed_ her. The sickening sense of realization, a mixture of fear and white-hot anger and overwhelming sadness, was something that Zuko would be hard-pressed to forget for the rest of his life.

But at the time when she would have been most justified in killing him—after defeating him in the Agni Kai, when even Agni himself would have allowed it—she had not. So Zuko wasn’t worried for his own life.

He was terrified that when he saw Azula, and looked into her eyes, he wouldn’t recognize the person staring back at him.

She had granted him the mercy that she had always scorned as weak, and so his traitorous heart could not help but hope that there was some part of his sister still in there, that there was something in her mind that wanted him there with her. But that hope was tenuous, and it had grown more fragile with every flinch and fearful glance of the people around him.

And if that hope died, he was not sure what else he could hold onto.

“Your Highness,” came a voice, and he looked over to see one of the guards stationed inside his room approaching him.

“Yes?” he said, unable to keep his confusion completely hidden.

The guard shifted, looking almost _uncomfortable_ , and Zuko’s eyes narrowed. There was something going on, and he was almost certain he wasn’t going to like it.

“Her Majesty the Fire Lord requests your presence in her dining chambers,” the guard said, and cold realization washed over him. “I have been instructed to…bring you there.”

There it was.

Zuko closed his eyes, and let his head fall back to rest against the pillow. It would have been uncharacteristic of his sister to hold off on playing games with him for so long, but it still stung. She would probably tell him that he was stupid for expecting her to come to his rooms just because he couldn’t walk, or _stand_ , or—

Well. There was no point in dwelling on it. He knew from experience that every bit of a reaction that he gave would only serve to egg her on further, and he had no intention of giving her the satisfaction.

He was too exhausted to take part in her games, anyways.

“What is your name?” he asked softly, not opening his eyes.

“Ri, Your Highness.”

He let himself have one last breath, and then used his arms to push himself up into a sitting position as best he could. When he reopened his eyes, he gave the guard his best attempt at a smile. It was not his fault for following orders, after all. Not when they came from Azula, and not when he seemed to derive no personal pleasure from them.

“Well, Ri,” he said dryly, “it wouldn’t do to keep my sister waiting, now would it?”

“No, Your Highness.”

He did his best not to instinctively tense up when Ri leaned in over him to slip one arm around his shoulders and the other under his knees. The sensation of being lifted up, when he couldn’t feel below his hips, was something he didn’t quite know how to articulate. He couldn’t figure out if it felt like he was floating or falling.

Either way, when Ri stood fully and the true extent of his helplessness hit him, it was all he could do to keep his hands in his lap, clenched into fists. As unsteady as he felt, there was nothing in the world that could bend his pride enough for him to clutch at Ri’s shoulders.

It was completely humiliating, to be carried around like a—like a _child_ —

The last person to carry him like this had been Uncle, when he had been eleven years old and had sprained his ankle after Azula had tripped him, his mind supplied him unhelpfully.

Almost frantically, he pushed the thought away. He didn’t even know if Uncle was alive, and each time he thought of him it made his chest twist with a burning twinge of fear.

“It will be just a few moments, Your Highness,” Ri told him gently, as they stepped out into the corridors.

Zuko glanced up at him, and felt some of the tension in his shoulders ease slightly. The reassurance was a sign of decency—of kindness, even—that he was not owed but had been given, regardless.

It made him curious.

To everyone’s knowledge, he was a traitor to the throne who had tried to kill their Fire Lord. And yet, none of them—not Ri, nor Iyemi, nor the few servants who had helped him—had been anything less than polite to him.

Though perhaps it was just how they had learned to deal with Azula. She had always been unpredictable, if not outright dangerous, and especially so to those outside her immediate family.

Zuko would gain nothing by adding to whatever fear and stress they already had to carry with them.

“Thank you,” he said.

When Ri glanced down at him, expression unreadable, he did his best to give him another smile. It was small, and felt a little awkward on his face, but he tried to recall the way Uncle had always beamed at him—wide and open and genuine.

Ri cleared his throat and looked away, and Zuko hoped that his sincerity had come across.

“It was nothing, Your Highness,” he said.

They turned a corner, and Zuko realized with a jolt that they hadn’t encountered a single soul since leaving his room. He’d known that the halls would be bustling with guards, servants, and military officials—as they had during his childhood—and had dreaded being carried all the more because of it. But there were no guards lining the doors that they passed, no servants scurrying by them as they carried out their work, and no officials walking around in groups and talking to each other in low voices.

Everyone was gone.

“Ri,” he asked, not sure he was ready for the answer, “where is everyone?”

The grip around his back shifted as the guard gathered his words, and Zuko held his breath as he waited. He prayed to Agni that his sister had not killed them. She’d lashed out at innocent bystanders in the past, even when she’d been younger, but had never killed anyone.

She’d burned several, but never fatally.

“Her Majesty the Fire Lord has dismissed many of the staff, Your Highness,” Ri said, speaking slowly and with care. “Several others have been called away due to family emergencies.”

That…was honestly to be expected. Azula had never been a very trusting person to begin with, and she would no doubt have been left reeling in the wake of Ozai’s death. It wasn’t hard to imagine that she would have become much more paranoid in his absence, or that the frequency of her outbursts would have increased. It was to be expected that many would leave, either at her orders or of their own will.

Zuko could remember several times, during his childhood, when a servant had resigned suddenly from their position, citing a family emergency—typically after being unlucky enough to make a mistake in the Fire Lord’s presence. The practice had become more common by the time Zuko had returned from exile, when his father had become more unstable, and those who did not leave often wound up burnt.

It appeared to be continuing under Azula.

“Have there been any deaths?” he breathed.

Ri’s grip tightened for just an instant.

“No, Your Highness,” he said, and Zuko wilted slightly in relief. “But there have been a few close calls.”

“I am sorry to hear that some have been injured,” Zuko told him, voice low. “But I am glad that there have been no deaths.”

They took a few more steps, passing into what he knew to be the Fire Lord’s personal wing of the palace. As they came into earshot of the two guards standing at the door to Azula’s rooms, Ri hefted Zuko up a bit higher.

“There is no need for an apology, Your Highness.” His voice was even. “It is Fire Lord Azula’s will and right to discipline her subjects as she sees fit.”

He couldn’t begrudge him for refusing to agree with him. Ri likely had much to lose if he was suspected to be a traitor to the throne. Zuko, on the other hand, had already plunged so deeply into treason that he doubted anything he did could make the situation worse.

“We may have to agree to disagree,” he replied, conceding Ri’s acceptance of Azula’s behavior but withholding his own. “I have noticed that my sister often confuses fear for respect.”

“They are one and the same, Your Highness,” Ri said, as they stopped in front of the doors. He nodded to the guards, who moved to open the doors.

Zuko held his head as high as he could. He refused to let his embarrassment show on his face, even when he saw the guards’ eyes catch on Ri’s arms curled around his shoulders and knees. This reflected more on Azula than on him, he reminded himself firmly.

Azula was perched in the center of the room, on the far side of a low dining table. It had been set up for a traditional dinner, the same way it had been any time Zuko had taken dinner with his father, but it looked like the servants had not yet brought out the first course. As soon as Ri stepped through the doors, she perked up.

“Zuzu!” she crowed, sitting back onto the heels of her palms. “How nice of you to join us.”

“Forgive me,” Zuko drawled, doing his best to pretend that his heart wasn’t about to beat its way out of his chest. “I would bow, but…”

He trailed off and gestured to his legs as nonchalantly as he could.

Azula just laughed at him, though he got the distinct sense that it wasn’t at his words but rather at his attempt at bravado. She tended to only be truly amused at his expense.

“Come, sit,” she ordered. Her gaze was sharp but her smile never completely left her lips. “I know you probably can’t manage a proper seiza right now, so I brought you a chair.”

She lifted a hand casually and flicked her fingers towards the legless chair that had been set up opposite her. It was certainly true that Zuko couldn’t maintain the formal seated posture on his own—even sitting in the chair would likely still be difficult. He was slightly surprised that she hadn’t said to hell with it and let him struggle through trying to kneel for the fun of it. If he ignored the game that she was trying to play with him, he could almost pretend that it was a nice gesture.

“Thank you,” he told her, and her smugness would have normally filled him with white-hot anger, but he was so _tired_. Too tired to hold onto the indignation.

Her lip curled further, but she didn’t respond. Instead, she sat in silence and stared unabashedly as Ri placed Zuko down onto the seat, settling Zuko’s back against the chair and arranging his legs comfortably in front of him. His movements were just a tad too smooth, too practiced, for Zuko to believe that he was just a normal guard. His hands were near-clinical in their detached efficiency.

He’d done this before. That was something he could unpack later, when Azula wasn’t sitting mere feet away from him.

“The healer tells me you can move your arms now,” Azula announced. “Show me.”

She waved her hands, and a single servant scurried into the room, balancing a small plate on either hand. Normally a team of at least five would serve royal dinners, but he was alone. Zuko watched, distracted, as he set one down in front of Azula and scrambled around the other side of the table to set the other one down in front of him. His breathing was panicked enough that Zuko could hear it from where he set, and his hands trembled slightly as he set down the plate. As soon as he had, he all but sprinted away from the table.

Zuko’s brows furrowed as the man retreated to the far corner of the room, pressing himself back against the wall as if he could phase through it if he tried hard enough.

Just how much was his sister terrorizing her staff?

“I wasn’t aware that hearing loss was one of your symptoms,” remarked Azula, clearly displeased, and he started.

Fine. If she wanted him to demonstrate, then he’d demonstrate.

There was a fork laid out to the right of his table setting. Iyemi had clearly told Azula that he’d had difficulties with chopsticks; though his fingers had been the first part to recover motion, they had since progressed much more slowly than the rest of his arm. He concentrated and lifted his arm up, slightly at first, and then higher, until it was level with the table. Closing his fingers around the fork was a little more difficult, and his grip felt a little more awkward that it used to, but he picked it up successfully and brought it over to the plate to spear a piece of meat with no mishaps.

Azula’s face was neutral, but all of her attention was focused on the way his hand moved as he brought the bite to his mouth. He knew that nothing escaped her notice, not even the slightest tremors in his fingers. She’d always been keenly observant, and no doubt she was testing the extent of his recovery herself.

If what he was noticing about the palace staff was true, then his sister’s paranoia had run rampant in the time since he’d left. He wouldn’t be surprised if Azula didn’t trust Iyemi to keep her informed about his condition.

“How long can you keep that up for?” she demanded, jerking her chin at his hand as it grasped the fork.

Zuko dropped his elbow to rest against the table while he finished chewing. Azula’s eyes followed the motion like a hawk, and he did his best not to betray how much relief it brought him to let the table take most of his arm’s weight.

“Like this, long enough to make it through a meal,” he answered, once he swallowed. “It’s getting better every day, though. Iyemi thinks the nerve damage for my arms is constrained to a smaller region, so it’s healing faster.”

Azula didn’t seem surprised; then again, he doubted that any of this was news to her.

“But still nothing with your legs,” she said.

He wasn’t fully able to suppress his wince at that one, and took a steadying breath in preparation for her to latch on to it. When they’d both been younger, even before mother had disappeared, Azula had always gleefully mocked him for any injuries—as she had with anything that could have been used to prove that she was better than him. If ten-year-old Azula had found out her brother could be paralyzed for life, she’d have had a field day.

The Azula sitting in front of him said nothing, and just kept looking at him expectantly.

“Not yet,” he confirmed, and took another bite, though his appetite had suddenly left him.

“And how often does the healer test them?”

“Practically every minute I spend awake,” he told her. “She makes me do the arm exercises while she stretches them.”

Azula hummed, twirling her chopsticks in her hand as she processed the information. It was so slight that he could have been imagining it, but he thought that her expression seemed a little softer than it had been when he’d entered. Or maybe ‘softer’ wasn’t the right word; none of Azula’s expressions could really be described that way anymore. But the look in her eyes, though still calculating, seemed a little less sharp than it had before.

Though she still hadn’t taken a single bite, and Zuko was completely done with the first course. The servant scurried forward to take their dishes away, and then to bring in steaming bowls of seafood soup. He took a bite. Azula did not move.

“How have you been, Azula?” he asked carefully.

“If you can move your arms, you can bend,” she said, ignoring him. “Show me.”

His heart sank.

Deep in his stomach, where his chi used to smolder and flare, lay nothing but a cold, empty pit. He hadn’t tried to bend anything, but he had no hope of succeeding. It wasn’t the first time his fire had seemingly abandoned him, but every other time he’d had faith that it would come back.

He wasn’t so sure anymore.

But when he told Azula as much, she just rolled her eyes.

“I didn’t ask you whether or not you felt like it,” she said, tone scathing. “I told you to show me your bending.”

He flipped his hand over where it had been resting against the table, so that his palm faced towards the sky. The warmth in his belly felt like it was absent, but he imagined it anyways, imagined it flowing up and across his chest into his shoulder and down his arm to collect in the skin of his palm. Breathed in, and breathed out.

When he opened his eyes and they focused on the space just above his palm, as cold and empty as it had been before, the pit in his stomach swelled.

Azula didn’t even blink.

“Again.”

“Azula—” he began.

“I said _again_ ,” she snapped, and her chopsticks snapped inside her fist. Her eyes never left his palm, and she dropped the pieces to the table with a clatter.

He’d been right to suspect that she’d become much more unstable recently. It wasn’t unheard of for her to lose her temper—as much as she tried to deny it, she struggled with anger just like Zuko did—but it was always targeted towards something. Azula used her anger to produce fear, and so she projected it onto others, and lashed out at them to prove the strength of her fury. When they’d been younger, that outlet had often been Zuko, but others around her hadn’t been immune, either.

A display of anger that didn’t serve a purpose was uncharacteristic of her.

“Alright,” he said placatingly.

Azula’s eyes fixated on his hand as he took a deep breath, and then another. Instead of picturing the warmth in his core, he tried to dig deeper, past the emptiness inside of him. Tried to burrow past his actual flesh and bone, and to reach beyond into the spark that made him _more_ than just a body. And when he found what he thought could be it—though it was so scant he only barely believed himself—he seized onto it with every ounce of his being.

A bead of sweat trickled down his spine.

He grabbed that feeling tighter, and _yanked._

The tiniest flame he had ever seen sputtered to life a few inches above the skin of his palm.

Zuko said nothing, struck speechless, and stared dumbly at his hand long after the flame flickered out. Deep within his belly, the empty pit felt like it had withdrawn into itself, shying away from the warmth of the spark within him. It had been so heavily dampened, had fallen so far away from his physical body, that he’d feared it had left him completely.

But just because it had been too weak and too distant for him to feel it hadn’t meant that it was gone.

“And that’s why you should always listen to me,” Azula sniffed, sitting back and shooting him a smug look. “I’m always right.”

She was treating the return of his bending like it was a good thing. And it was—the relief that he wasn’t _broken,_ not in the ways that truly mattered, not deep within his actual soul, was hitting him in a wave of adrenaline. He’d feared he’d never bend again, and the release of that tension and fear was almost euphoric. But Zuko was the enemy in Azula’s eyes, and anything that brought him this much joy and relief was something that she should scorn, if everything she’d spat at him about hating him was true.

And if it wasn’t…

“Are you worried about me, Azula?” he asked.

Her eyes shot up to meet his, ablaze with anger. She leaned forward, smoke curling into the air around her palms, and he flinched back despite himself. Even if he knew she wouldn’t kill him, she could definitely still hurt him, and he was still recovering from their last confrontation. Her eyes tracked his movement, noting his fear, and a sort of hollow satisfaction bled into her snarl.

“You think I worry for you, Zuzu?” she hissed. “Tell me, if I cared for you so much, why were you carried in here like a babe too young to walk, instead of standing on your own two feet?”

In all honesty, he didn’t trust that her care for him extended much further past not wanting him dead. But he had little to lose if he trusted her more than she deserved, and everything to gain if he proved right.

It was more than their relationship that hung in the balance. Azula was Fire Lord, now, and her actions would determine large parts of the outcome of this war. It was Azula’s life, it was those who lived and worked in the palace, it was all of Azula’s subjects and all of those in the other nations who had lived and fought and died during the past hundred years.

And she was still his sister.

“The fact that there was anything left of me to be carried through that door speaks for itself,” he insisted. “You had every right to kill me, and yet something stayed your hand.”

“Yes, fine,” Azula spat, and blue flames flickered along her tongue “I kept you alive, but only because I knew that fool in Ba Sing Se wouldn’t dare destroy the Capital if he knew that you were held here—”

“Uncle doesn’t have the power to stop the war on my behalf,” Zuko interrupted, though his voice trembled at the thought of Uncle— _alive_ —in Ba Sing Se, listening to news of his capture with disappointment, because what else could he feel when Zuko had failed him? “Why are you lying to me, Azula?”

Azula leapt to her feet, and there were flames in her palms where smoke had been before. Her eyes were bright—with anger or fear, he couldn’t tell—and a few strands of hair fell out from her topknot to fall across her forehead. Terror clawed its way down his neck and spine, but she didn’t move towards him, instead raging at him from where she stood.

“Shut up!” she screeched.

Another tongue of flames fell from her lips. Across the room, the servant yelped in fear and scrambled for the exit, but Zuko forced himself to sit tall, watching her sadly. He was by no means unafraid, because he knew Azula was dangerous when she was unpredictable, but it was overwhelmingly tragic to see her reduced to this.

“Calm down, Azula,” he tried. “It’s just me. There’s no one else here, so please sit down.”

“I _know_ that, you idiot,” she seethed, but she sat down jerkily. Her palms were still smoking, and her jaw was clenched so tightly he was worried for her teeth, but she had sat down when he had asked her to.

Zuko blinked, almost surprised that it had worked.

“Look, I’m not trying to undermine you in front of your staff,” he said, as sincerely as he knew how. “You saved my life, and I’m grateful, but I’d like to know why you did.”

Azula scoffed.

“If I’d killed you, you would’ve died thinking you were some sort of martyr,” she said. “Sitting by helplessly while the rest of your friends are imprisoned or crushed beneath my fists is a much more fitting punishment for what you’ve done.”

The mention of his friends was an obvious bait, and he knew he had to ignore her, but Zuko had spent so long worrying himself sick over whether or not they were alive that it physically pained him not to take it.

“What have I done, Azula?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what have you done?” she said incredulously. Her nails dug into the edge of the table so hard it left marks in the polished wood. “You know exactly what you’ve done. I gave you a second chance and you betrayed father, betrayed your Nation—”

She cut herself off sharply.

The words that she had bit back lingered in the air between them.

“I didn’t do it to betray you,” Zuko said, and from the way her shoulders tensed he knew he’d hit the nail on the head. “I left because I had to do what I thought was right, and because chasing after father’s approval for all those years never once made me happy. If there had been a way to leave him without leaving you, I would have.”

And it was true. But at that point he knew that their father and the war had twisted them too much for their paths to align, as much as he wished that they could. As he’d left, his heart had constricted with sorrow that things had turned out this way.

It had also roiled with anger because so much of this had been out of their control.

When Zuko had been banished by his father, he’d been forced to leave Azula behind. With Uncle following him, and their mother long gone, his exile had also meant that Azula had been left in the palace with no one but their father to rely on. For every year that Uncle had pushed Zuko to do the right thing, their father had crafted Azula into his perfect little weapon.

Then Azula had brought him home, and mere weeks later Zuko had left again, and this time he had done it of his own volition.

His sister was full of so much anger, and so much hurt, and the knowledge that he was responsible for a large part of it was something that ate at him daily. But he’d always wondered if she’d understood exactly why she had been so furious at him for leaving.

Because he hadn’t just left his father, and he hadn’t just left the Fire Nation.

He had left _her_.

From her defensive posture, and the narrowing of her eyes, she hadn’t. But he doubted that their father had ever taught her to try to understand any of her emotions, rather than suppressing them out of fear of being seen as weak.

It only pulled at his heart more.

“I thought you said we weren’t lying to each other, Zuzu,” Azula said, smiling bitterly at him. “I don’t need you to pretend to care about me like you cared about your _friends_. Not that it did them much good.”

She was using them bait, and he _knew_ it was bait, but her words made his breath seize in his lungs. He grabbed desperately at the table as if it could somehow ground him, even as the room swam in his peripheral vision.

“What did you _do,_ Azula,” he gasped. “Are they alive? Did you hurt them? Katara—she was with me, what did you do to her?”

“See?” she cried, leaping to her feet once more. “See, the second I mention them, they’re all you care about, you liar!”

Zuko cursed himself. He struggled to try and push himself towards her, but his stupid legs wouldn’t _move_ , and all he could do was adopt a pleading tone to try and calm her down the way he had last time.

“Azula, no, that’s not what I meant—”

 _“Shut up!”_ she screamed, turning away from him and curling her shoulders in on herself. “Get out, get out— _guards!”_

She wasn’t listening to him. Zuko gaped at her in shock as the doors banged open and guards spilled into the room in a red wave. Ri was at the forefront, and made a beeline towards him as Azula let out a wordless scream of fury.

“Please don’t fight, Your Highness,” he mumbled.

That was all the warning he gave before hoisting him up into his arms. Zuko flailed in his grip, heart racing so fast he could swear it skipped a step, and clutched at the fabric of Ri’s shirt. More guards were pouring into the room and Ri was all but running away from where Azula was still _screaming_ —

“Wait,” Zuko babbled, a second too late. He clawed at Ri’s arms desperately, as if he could force him to turn back. “No, wait, I can’t leave, I need to go back, please—”

“I have to get you back to your rooms, Your Highness,” Ri said, cutting him off. He increased his pace until they were almost sprinting, and each step jostled Zuko slightly in his arms.

“Please,” Zuko breathed, staring with wide eyes down the hallway to where smoke poured from Azula’s rooms.

Ri said nothing, and carried him further away silently.

His sister’s screams echoed in the distance behind them.

* * *

Azula didn’t scream with rage, but blue flames licked at the skin of her palms with enough fury that the guards and servants in the room around her cowered back against the walls. All she wanted to do was blast flames at Zuko’s infuriating face, but luckily for him, his guard had pulled him out of the room almost immediately.

So she stood there, palms smoking, as the palace staff hovered wordlessly around her, and concentrated on not burning the entire fucking palace down around her.

Of course he’d only been biding his time to try and find out more about his friends. Of course he’d only been pretending to care about her so that he could drop everything for _them_ at the soonest opportunity. She hadn’t even had to threaten them, and he’d grasped onto their mention like a dying man gasping for air, abandoning all pretenses of trying to _bond_ with her or whatever he’d been trying to do.

She had screamed in his face, and he had just _looked_ at her. He had looked so much like Ursa, in that moment, and it had only made her more furious, because how _dare_ he look at her like that. Like her. Like he cared, like he was sad, when he was only just pretending.

Even as his guard had carried him off, like a parent pulling a child away from danger, he’d had the audacity to look at her with anger and regret instead of fear.

Her palms itched to _burn_ that stupid look off of his face.

Instead, she took a breath, and forced her anger inwards. She forced it down until it was no more than a simmer, until it lay just beneath her skin, flowing through her veins like the very flames she controlled. Her breath cooled, until it only carried the slightest suggestion of flames, and she forced her hands to uncurl from the fists she had clenched them into.

If she looked, she was sure that her palms would have thin, bloody indentations from where her fingernails had dug into her skin.

She breathed once more, to be sure that she would appear deadly and cold and dangerous, instead of raging like a petulant child. Then, she stalked out of the room.

Her servants peeled away almost immediately, huddling into the sides of the corridors and disappearing at the first turn she took. She paid them no mind. Her guards followed her silently, though she could see them shooting each other terrified, questioning looks when they thought she wasn’t looking. Her breath steamed, but no flames appeared, and she kept walking.

The guards’ confusion eased slightly when they reached the edges of the palace, and kept going, making a beeline for the behemoth of a tower at the opposite end of the caldera.

At Azula’s request, the Capital City Prison had undergone extensive renovations, both in terms of structure and in terms of staff. The security breaches on the Day of the Black Sun had been unacceptable, and their new prisoners too high-priority to risk any more escapes.

She remembered replacing the Warden, but couldn’t quite recall the new one’s name. Not that it mattered much.

They all looked the same when they bowed.

“Your Majesty—” the Warden began, but Azula wasn’t in the mood.

“Leave us,” she ordered, and stalked past him without another word. Her guards filed in swiftly behind her. The prison guards, at least, were smart enough not to follow.

The prison was a massive, ugly thing, carved entirely from the stone that made up the rim of the caldera. The only source of light came from the torches lining the walls; a dim, pallid light that paled in comparison to the warmth of the sun. With the security redesign, guards had been stationed at the doors to every occupied cell. If anyone ever managed to escape their cell, they would have to get past veritable army to have any hope of making it outside the prison.

With every additional story, the security grew tighter with the exception of the underground floor, which was the most heavily-guarded of the entire prison. Azula made her way straight to the stairwell, and began climbing. The first and second floors were reserved for non-benders only.

She kept climbing.

The highest floor of the prison was home to only two prisoners. She stopped at the doors to the first cell, and nodded at the prison guards standing there when they dropped into a bow. The one on the right handed her a single key, and then both of them fell back to a respectful distance.

Azula had spent the entire walk containing her anger, but it still slipped into her voice when she spoke.

“Hello, peasant.”

The girl in front of her bared her teeth, blue eyes bright with fury. If she hadn’t been chained, her hands encased in metal and her body suspended from the ceiling, Azula had no doubt that she would’ve lunged for her.

“My name is Katara,” she growled. She would have been a great deal more threatening if she hadn’t been completely powerless.

Azula had taken precautions to ensure that her bending would be a nonissue. She had been in the room when Ozai had been told of an attack on the leader of raids into the South Pole—when he’d been told of how the man in question had been stripped of control of his own body.

Her father had dismissed the reports, but Azula had sat silently by his side and had _listened._

She would not underestimate the waterbender girl. She was smart enough to put two and two together—to remember the case of the waterbender who had bloodbent her way out of prison—and hadn’t given the girl the chance to even _try_.

Their fight during the Agni Kai had been almost amusing. The girl hadn’t seemed to realize that water conducted lightning until it had been too late.

And she wasn’t much of a threat now, trapped in a room kept too dry and too cold for any condensation or sweat to form. She couldn’t bloodbend her way out of her cell with her hands sheathed in metal behind her back, couldn’t attack anyone when she couldn’t even move an inch. She was completely contained, because Azula made a point of knowing her enemies, and she had left no room for the peasant to so much as twitch.

It gave Azula all the freedom that she needed to _play._

“I don’t care what your name is.” Azula waved dismissively. “You really should be more respectful, you know. After all, you are in the presence of the Fire Lord.”

The peasant’s jaw clenched, but she said nothing. She’d had no visitors since being brought here; no knowledge of the outside world.

Azula planned to remedy that.

“Where is Zuko?” the peasant demanded. “What did you do to him?”

Her audacity was almost impressive, if she hadn’t been so weak as to have her worry painted so clearly on her face. Azula could remember the way her face had twisted with horror during the Agni Kai—the way she’d screamed when Azula had reached out and grabbed the little spark of something like lightning in her brother’s chest and had _snuffed_ it out and he had collapsed to the floor.

Even now, she could feel her lips curling at the memory.

They had underestimated her. Zuko had been prepared for flashy displays of lightning, but he should’ve known that she was better than everyone who had come before her. Even _Ozai_ hadn’t been capable of sensing the electricity inside someone, let alone stopping it. And not even the Fire Sages could control their lightning to the extent that Azula could—not to kill, or even maim, but to _paralyze_.

But Azula was the best firebender that anyone had ever seen since the times of Avatar Roku, and even he hadn’t been able to produce blue flame the way she could. Even he hadn’t invented not one, but _two_ new bending techniques, the way she had.

Her father had been wrong about a lot of things, and it had cost him his title and his bending. But he had never been wrong when he’d said that she was the _best._

“Little Zuzu and I are getting along splendidly,” she grinned, leaning closer to the bars of the cell. “He’s even awake now, though he’s become terribly boring now that he can’t walk.”

The peasant gritted her teeth and thrashed in her chains. “You’re a monster,” she snarled.

There were red lines against her skin where she had dug into her bonds. She was like Zuko in at least one regard: neither of them could play Azula’s games to save their life. Toying with her was so easy that Azula hardly even had to try; all she had to do was dangle her brother out in front of her and she’d snatched up the bait without hesitation. She wasn’t afraid, really, but she was _furious_ , and Azula would take it.

“I’m glad _someone_ recognizes it,” she said.

It was a thousand times better than Zuko, who only ever looked frustrated or sad when he looked at her, no matter how much she screamed at him. Who had the audacity to look at her with puppy dog eyes and pretend like he cared about her, even though he flinched away from her fire and gave up the pretense as soon as she so much as mentioned his friends—

“You’re clearly here for a reason,” the waterbender girl spat. “So get to the point.”

Azula took a step closer towards the bars, ignoring the budding heat in her palms. The peasant didn’t flinch back, glaring at her with pure hatred, and something like satisfaction coiled dangerously in her stomach.

“I come bearing my most sincere consolations,” she said, twisting her features into a mocking facsimile of sympathy.

The peasant didn’t respond, but a flicker of wary confusion crossed her face before it was swallowed once more by her anger. She seized onto it with glee; this wasn’t like the frustration she felt around Zuko, this was familiar. Here, she was a puppetmaster, and she was guiding the girl along on her strings, and the payoff of what she had been building up to was fast approaching.

“Why, haven’t you heard?” she told her gleefully. “My father may have lost his battle, but he at least escaped with his own life.”

Two things widened: the girl’s eyes, and Azula’s smile.

“That’s right,” she hissed, pressing her face so close that she could feel the hint of cool metal against her skin. “Your Avatar is _dead.”_

The scream that left the girl’s lips barely even sounded human, it was so raw with grief and fury. Azula didn’t flinch, not even when the girl jerked so violently in her bonds that the metal creaked. She drank in the rage dripping from the peasant’s eyes and voice and _soul_ with satisfaction.

It wasn’t fear. And it wasn’t Zuko.

But it was enough.

Her anger had retreated back within her for now, so she turned and left without another word. The waterbender girl’s screaming continued, following her down the stone hallways as she walked away. Her guards fell into step behind her.

They did not ask her why she was smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we got more fire sibling interaction this chapter! if you think things are rocky now, hold on tight. lastly: i've left some clues all over this chapter to point you towards what's going to become another major plot point in this story. any guesses?


	3. Chapter Three

Azula didn’t send for him at all for three full days. Zuko spent that time trapped in his bed, slowly fading away from boredom, and overthinking absolutely _everything._

Most of all, he couldn’t help but be frustrated by just how little he knew about what was going on in the world around him. He knew that Ba Sing Se had been liberated, which meant that Uncle was hopefully alright and that the Earth Kingdom couldn’t have been fully destroyed—thank Agni for that. The fleet must have been stopped, so Sokka, Toph, and Suki must have been successful in some capacity, but he didn’t know if they were alive, or imprisoned, or—

He didn’t let himself think too long about the last option.

Katara was probably alive, based on what Azula had said; most likely in Fire Nation custody. And Azula was Fire Lord, which meant that his father was dead, so Aang was hopefully alive.

(Sometimes a voice in the back of his mind would ask him why Aang hadn’t come to stop Azula, if he’d survived the fight with his father. Zuko ignored it every time.)

Ultimately, the only thing he could do was sit and stew in his own uncertainty. He hated feeling helpless like this; he needed more information. About Uncle, and the efforts in Ba Sing Se. About the Fire Nation armada and how much damage, if any, had been dealt to the Earth Kingdom. About Aang, and Katara, and the rest of his friends. But Azula had been incredibly volatile in their last interaction, and he had no idea how to try to ask for that information without setting her off. He’d felt so close to creating a kind of fragile connection with her last time, but it had shattered the second he’d asked about his friends.

So he lay in his bed, desperately trying to think of a way he could make this work, and getting more and more frustrated the more he failed to come up with anything.

On the first day, he asked Ri to let him out of his rooms, and all of the guards in the room tensed. By his side, Iyemi’s hands stilled on his legs before continuing with their motions. The guard in question froze, and then dropped into a full bow before Zuko could protest.

“My humblest apologies, Your Highness,” Ri said, forehead pressed against the floor. “Her Majesty the Fire Lord has requested that you remain in your rooms for now.”

As with before, Azula’s presence made itself known even in her absence. Zuko took a deep breath, and pushed himself up onto his elbows to look over the side of the bed at the man kneeling on the floor. He always felt awkward around the palace staff; they were skittish from their time under his father and sister, but being comforting had never been one of his strong suits. Half of the time, he feared he had made a servant or guard more upset by trying to reassure them.

“Please, rise,” he said, trying to keep his voice as nonthreatening as he could. When Ri looked up at him uncertainly, he did his best to give him a smile, and desperately wished that Sokka were here to make fun of him for it. He’d always laughed and said that Zuko looked pained any time he tried.

He didn’t even know if Sokka was alive.

But for now, he pushed those thoughts back. These people were Fire Nation, which meant that they were _his_ people. It was his responsibility to try to help them feel safe. When he spoke, he raised his voice so that it was clear that he was addressing everyone in the room—not just Ri.

“I know too well how unpredictable and cruel my father could be,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “And I know that Azula isn’t much better. I’m sorry if you’ve suffered under them, and—and please know that I don’t want to add to your hardship. I’m not like that. You’re not at fault for following my sister’s orders. I’m not—I’m not going to get mad at you for doing what you have to do.”

The guards and servants in the room exchanged looks, and Zuko wet his lips anxiously. It was at times like these that he desperately wished he had a way with words, the way Uncle, or Sokka, or even Aang did. Whenever he tried, even when it was important, he always seemed to trip over his own tongue.

He just wanted them to know they didn’t have to jump out of their skin with fright any time they thought they had displeased him.

One of his personal servants was the first to speak. Zuko realized that he had seen her almost every day—she had always been the one to wash and dress him—but that he had never heard her speak before.

“We are happy to serve Her Majesty the Fire Lord, Your Highness,” she said, and though her voice was gentle, it carried throughout the room. “That being said, you have our gratitude for your compassion.”

Zuko exhaled. He knew that none of them were in a position to openly defy Azula, not the way he was. But he wanted to make sure they understood that he wasn’t going to hurt them, and they were talking in guarded half-truths, and he’d always been bad at understanding that kind of court-speak—

“I just—” he started, and then stopped. None of his words seemed to be coming out right. “I don’t want any of you to get in trouble, or get hurt. Please know that you don’t have to fear me.”

“Thank you, Your Highness,” she said, and her voice was a tad warmer than before, her eyes a bit softer. Maybe some of his sincerity _had_ come through, after all.

“What is your name?” he asked quietly.

“Sei, Your Highness.”

“Thank you, Sei,” he said, and tried for another smile. Maybe with practice he’d get better at them. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask for your name sooner.”

Her eyes widened, and then she beamed back at him. He was almost jealous of how easily the expression seemed to come to her.

“It’s no problem, Your Highness,” she said.

Zuko turned back to Ri, who thankfully looked a little less like he was about to piss himself from fear.

“It’s really okay that I can’t leave,” he told him, and then gestured to his legs with a wry smile. “It’s probably better that I rest anyways.”

“Certainly, Your Highness,” Ri said. He hesitated, and then added, “I am praying to Agni for your recovery.”

Zuko blinked at him in surprise.

“—As he would pray for _any_ member of the royal family, I’m sure,” Iyemi cut in, shooting Ri a warning look from where she sat by the bed.

“Of course,” Zuko agreed, settling back against his pillows.

Ri dipped his head before returning to his post. Neither of them commented on the difference between praying for the current Fire Lord and praying for the captive, traitor prince that had attempted to unseat her. It was dangerous for anyone to show him kindness when word of it could potentially get back to Azula.

He stopped asking to be let out of his rooms after that.

From the first day onward, most of Zuko’ time awake was spent on Iyemi’s rehabilitation exercises. If he hadn’t been able to see the progress—as frustratingly slow as it was—in his upper body strength, he probably would’ve suspected her of purposefully making the exercises as painful as possible. He wouldn’t have put it past Azula to take advantage of the opportunity to torture him further. But with every day his arms felt a little stronger, and his sensation in them had almost fully returned.

He didn’t dare practice his bending outright—he was never left alone, and feared that any flames would be considered a threat by those around him. But that didn’t stop him from trying, again and again, to locate that tiniest spark of chi inside of him. His energy was usually almost nonexistent once Iyemi had finished with him, but whenever he could, he focused on drawing that warmth out from his core and into his veins, down the lengths of his arms and into the tips of his fingers.

He would even try to imagine it spreading down his legs, despite how much he tried to avoid thinking about them.

(It was easier to ignore the numbness if he just didn’t think about it.)

He threw himself into this, and into Iyemi’s exercises, because he had to get stronger. He wasn’t sure exactly what for—to attempt some sort of grand escape? He wasn’t doing much good here in the palace, but then again, he wasn’t sure how much good he’d be able to do outside of it, anyways. And he couldn’t leave his friends at the mercy of his sister.

But he needed to get better. Picking himself up after repeated failure was the only thing he knew, and had always been one of the only things he was good at. He couldn’t just sit there and waste away. He needed to try, even if he didn’t know what he was trying _for_.

On the morning of the third day of being confined to his rooms—marking a full week since he’d first woken up—Iyemi told him to wiggle his foot, and he _did_.

They both stared at his foot for a moment in shock.

Sei, who had paused where she’d been changing his robe, was the first to speak. She, and several of the others, had become a bit more talkative in the days since his fumbling speech, much to his delight.

“That’s wonderful, Highness!” she gasped, squeezing his shoulder.

“Took your sweet time in getting there, didn’t you,” Iyemi said gruffly, but the skin between her brows had smoothed slightly.

Zuko pushed himself further up onto his elbows to get a better look, feeling for all the world as if his heart had leapt out of his chest and left his body behind. He curled the toes on his other foot, and blinked in shock.

Then the full reality of it hit him, and he gulped for air, scrabbling for Iyemi’s arm.

“Iyemi,” he choked out. “Iyemi, does that mean—”

It said something about how much time they’d spent together that she knew what he was talking about, even when he could barely speak.

“I can’t guarantee a full recovery, Your Highness,” she said, and then gave him a small smile. “But it’s looking a lot more likely now that you’ve regained some motion.”

Zuko let out a laugh that sounded embarrassingly like a sob and fell back against his pillows.

He’d been doing his best to ignore it, and to pretend that it wasn’t bothering him, but it had been eating away at him ever since he’d first woken up. It had seemed as if Azula had taken even his own body away from him, had made it so that he would look down at his legs and struggle to remember that they were still attached to his body. He’d felt so _trapped_ , and _terrified_ , and it had only gotten worse with every day that he couldn’t feel or move _anything_ —

Iyemi put a hand on his ankle, in a way that was maybe meant to be comforting, and he could feel the warmth and weight of her fingers. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyelids as if it could hide his tears.

“I can feel it, Iyemi,” he whispered.

“That’s very good, Your Highness,” she said encouragingly. “Now, I’ll need to do some tests—”

“Why don’t you give him a minute to rest, first?” Sei cut in. “I’m sure he must be feeling overwhelmed right now. He’s just a child, and he’s been through a lot.”

The adrenaline from first moving his toes had started to wear off a little bit, and maybe he _was_ feeling a little like someone had draped him with a heavy weight, pulling his limbs back against the sheets and tempting him with sleep. But he couldn’t help but take offense at part of what she’d said.

“’M not a child,” he said, and if the words came out a little more petulantly than he’d intended, everyone in the room was kind enough to not comment on it. He tried again, a little more seriously this time. “Haven’t been for a while.”

Iyemi was looking at him strangely.

“…No,” she said, finally. “I suppose you aren’t.”

Still, she left him be, and the servants in the room slowly filed out until it was just him and the guards. There was a small part of Zuko’s mind that didn’t want to go to sleep, because he was afraid that he’d wake up and his legs would have become dead weight once more. But his energy levels had stayed low, no matter how much progress he’d made so far, and he couldn’t help but be pulled down into sleep.

* * *

Zuko received word that Azula had sent for him just a few hours after he’d successfully moved his legs, and he couldn’t quite figure out if it was because she had calmed down or because she wanted to see his progress for himself.

A tiny, terrified voice in the back of his mind screamed that maybe she didn’t want him to get better at all, that maybe she wanted him to stay helpless and paralyzed. That she might only be calling for him because she was going to hit him with lightning, again, and make it so that he wouldn’t be able to walk, ever—

He was getting so good at pushing back those kinds of thoughts that it was almost impressive.

Ri carried him to the tearoom, this time, instead of to Azula’s private chambers. Zuko had visited there frequently, with Uncle, when he’d been younger. If he remembered correctly, Azula had spent a fair amount of time there as well, with their father. He could recall feeling pangs of jealousy every time she rubbed it in his face that _she_ got to have private tea with the Fire Lord and his generals. Now, he idly wondered if his father would have used his attendance as a way to disfigure and banish him even earlier, if he’d been given the chance.

Though the room had been set for tea and a few servants lingered in the corners, Azula wasn’t there; maybe she was playing her games again, trying to make him sit and stew in his own anxiety while he waited for her. It was exhausting to have to read into and second-guess every little decision she made. Then again, Zuko had spent his entire childhood trying desperately to follow along to rules that his father would make. He was used to people who changed the rules without telling him and then punished him when all they’d done was set him up for failure.

There was a reason he was so good at picking himself back up. He’d had plenty of practice.

When Ri had arranged his legs carefully into a seated position on one side of the low table, he made to draw back, and then hesitated.

“Be careful, Highness,” he whispered, so quietly that no one else would hear them.

“I’ll be fine, Ri,” Zuko told him, patting his arm in a way that he hoped was reassuring.

Ri nodded, and stepped back to join the other guards at the door. He didn’t exactly look convinced, but then again, Zuko hadn’t quite been able to believe himself, either.

It seemed as if Azula hadn’t planned on keeping him waiting for long, though, because right at that moment she swept through the doors. Now that he knew to watch for it, Zuko could see the way everyone in the room—servants and guards alike—tensed at her presence. Though her expression did not betray it, he could tell that Azula was on guard, too. It was painted in the rigidity of her jaw, and in the uneven hair threatening to escape from her topknot.

Her paranoia itself was unsurprising. Zuko would have been suspicious of the staff—who’d only survived by being loyal to their father all these years—too, if he’d been in her position. But her wariness was _visible_ , and that was new.

As a child, out of self-preservation, Zuko had learned when to avoid his sister at all costs. He’d learned that an Azula who was shouting at him was annoying and sometimes painful, but that he needed to _run_ if she went quiet and still. Azula was at her most dangerous when she was calm.

The fact that she had spiraled enough to lose her composure was worrying.

“Hello, Azula,” he said tentatively, when she had taken a seat and the silence had begun to stretch out uncomfortably between them. “How have you been?”

She might see initiating conversation as a sign of weakness, of concession, but Zuko had long since learned to stop associating his father’s definition of weakness with guilt. It had been hard to realize that the things his father derided him for could be some of his biggest strengths. He’d had to see it in the people around him, to realize that the very traits he admired in his friends—things like Uncle’s patience, or Aang’s trust, or Katara’s compassion—would have been deemed too “weak” by his father. To realize that his only crime, as a thirteen-year-old boy, had been to care for the lives of his people. To realize that maybe his father had been wrong, to call those things weak.

“Your legs,” she demanded, ignoring him. “Show me.”

He sighed and leaned back on his palms to wiggle his toes at her. Even now, he almost had trouble believing that it was really him that was moving them. He’d spent too many days detached from his legs in both sensation and in movement, and it felt like he had almost forgotten how to feel like they were a part of him.

Azula tutted and inspected her nails instead of meeting his eyes.

“Shame,” she said airily. “Would’ve been fitting for you to remain weak and crippled for the rest of your life.”

Zuko didn’t bother mentioning that she could remedy that easily enough, if she really wanted to. They both knew that well enough. He tried to tell himself that the thought of it didn’t scare him, but still found himself holding his breath.

They fell back into silence, and two of the servants broke away from the edges of the room to pour their tea. Azula’s gaze followed them sharply, trained completely on their hands as they moved.

“Thank you,” Zuko told them when they were done, mindful of the tremors in their hands, and the girl who had poured his tea just about jumped out of her skin. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he added hastily, but the poor girl all but fled from the room, apologizing profusely as she left.

Azula watched her leave, and scoffed.

“You’re a pathetic excuse for a prince,” she said scornfully. “Will you even care when they start spreading rumors that you’ve gone _soft?”_

She kept calling him that, weak and soft and pathetic, as if it could hurt him. As if he couldn’t tell that she was just parroting everything their father had ever told her. As if he hadn’t grown enough to take his father’s scorn as a compliment.

“I’m just being kind, Azula,” Zuko frowned. “I’ve been trying to do that more, lately. They’re still our people—”

“Are they?” she challenged, gripping her cup until her knuckles bled white. “Are you seriously stupid enough to think they have forgotten father’s influence so easily?”

It was almost alarming that she had admitted to her suspicion so readily, especially when several of the people in question were still in the room with them. Zuko’s eyes narrowed.

“Father is dead, and he named you his heir,” he said. “Why would they be working against you?”

“Who said he was dead?” Azula asked, quirking a brow, and Zuko’s heart skipped a beat in his chest.

“What?” he said faintly. “He’s still—”

He stopped to try and breathe, and clutched the table tighter, feeling almost as if it were the only thing keeping him upright. He’d been so sure that his father was dead. How, otherwise, could Azula be Fire Lord? How could Ba Sing Se still be standing? Sure, Zuko’s thoughts towards his father’s death had admittedly been more complicated than he would’ve liked; as much as he despised him, he couldn’t exactly bring himself to rejoice over the idea. But the idea that his father was still out there, and could come bursting through those doors at any moment in all of his blazing _fury_ —

“Calm down,” Azula said, so sharply that Zuko actually stopped panicking to look up at her. “The Avatar didn’t kill him, but he did something to him. He’s not…he can’t bend anymore.”

Zuko’s eyes just about popped out of his head.

“Aang can do that?” he whispered.

He’d never heard of someone’s bending being taken away. The thought of his father without his fire was so utterly alien that he couldn’t quite picture it. So much of the jumbled mess of hope-shame-longing-anger- _fear_ that he felt for his father was based around the image of him that had been seared into his brain on that day in the Agni Kai room. The image of Fire Lord Ozai, with all the power of Agni behind him, with his gold eyes hard with fury and his hand wreathed in flames where it cupped his face.

Who was his father, without his flames? Without his title?

“It’s not much of a life, is it,” Azula commented, and she might have been aiming for a casual tone but it came out a bit too quietly.

They shared a silent but knowing look. It was something that only benders could understand; just how much their connection to their element was a _part_ of them. Just how horrifying and hollow of an existence it would be, to be separated from that.

There was no doubt in his mind that the remainder of his father’s sanity must have left him along with his bending.

“Well,” she continued, brushing off the solemnity that had settled across their shoulders with a wave of her hand. “A defeated, senile nonbender can’t be Fire Lord, and I was crowned before the battle, so.”

“Your people know that,” Zuko pointed out. “Father was in his right mind when he gave you the title of Fire Lord, and he is no longer…fit for it. You will gain little from treating everyone around you as if they are a traitor.”

“Why would I risk it, when the cost could be my own life?” she countered, eyes glittering dangerously.

He had to tread carefully, or risk inciting her rage, the way he had last time. But it was difficult when every step felt like he was treading across a minefield.

“Is that why you’ve fired almost all of the palace staff, and replaced everyone else?” he asked.

Her smile twitched, which was enough of an answer for him.

“Initially, I banished everyone,” she told him bitterly. “Once father was indisposed, however, I realized it wouldn’t be…viable, in the long run.”

Zuko hummed.

“Sometimes, it takes more strength to trust than it does to suspect,” he said, channeling as much of his inner Uncle as he could. He’d always been better with words than Zuko had, anyways.

Azula bristled, and he suppressed a sigh. He should’ve known that she wouldn’t respond to anything that sounded like it could’ve come from Uncle. In certain ways, she was a lot like Zuko had been in the first years of his banishment—responding with anger when people tried to help her, because she was terrified of being pitied or seen as weak.

“Taking precautions does _not_ mean I’m scared,” she sneered.

“How you are perceived sometimes matters more than who you actually are,” he pointed out, careful not to disagree with her. “But if _I_ can tell that you won’t let your servants near you, others are noticing, too. You don’t want rumors that the new Fire Lord is afraid of her own Nation.”

It wasn’t exactly the argument he wanted to make, but it was also the only thing he could see her responding to, right then. He wasn’t sure if she’d ever get to the point where she could admit to being afraid, but he was stuck here. He was good at nothing if not at being stubborn, and she wouldn’t kill him, so he’d be damned if he didn’t try.

“I don’t let them near me anymore because the last time I did, one of them tried to _stab_ me with my own headpiece,” Azula said, mouth twisted in annoyance.

Zuko doubted that, but he didn’t push.

“What if you let me do your hair, then?” he offered, surprising himself in the process.

Azula froze, and then laughed.

“I’m sorry, was that supposed to be a joke?” she asked incredulously, brushing a stray hair back from her forehead. “Because if it was, it was hardly funny.”

“But when we were young, you used to let me,” he insisted, not entirely sure where the words were coming from, but running with them anyways. She hadn’t immediately shot fire at him or shut him down, which was as close to a go-ahead as he could get from her. “You don’t have to trust me to be loyal to you, because you already know where I stand. You just have to trust me to be too _weak_ to try to kill you.”

She stared at him for a long moment, with narrowed eyes, as if trying to figure out his ulterior motive. Little did she know he didn’t have one; he usually didn’t. He didn’t know what he thought this would accomplish, but anything that required her to place trust in him could be helpful. There’d been a time, during their childhood, before their father’s influence had seeped so deeply into their lives, when they’d gotten along. Anything that could remind her of those times was worth exploring.

Finally, her lips quirked in amusement.

“I suppose it would be fitting,” she sniffed, “for a disgraced prince to be demoted to his enemy’s _hairdresser._ ”

Zuko didn’t rise to the taunt, and didn’t even try to argue with her about not seeing her as an enemy. He still felt like this was a victory for him—it was the closest thing to an olive branch he’d gotten in years from her—and so he hid a smile into his tea.

Maybe Azula sensed that he had somehow gained a sort of upper hand over the conversation, because she switched the topic abruptly.

“Your guards tell me you have nightmares,” she told him.

If she had hoped to throw him off by bringing those up, then she was mistaken. Zuko had been living with nightmares ever since his banishment. At first, they had been violent, and he’d woken up screaming, sometimes crying, soaked in a cold sweat. Uncle was the only one who’d ever been privy to those, during his first few months on the ship. He’d always been there when Zuko had screamed himself awake, with a cup of jasmine tea and long, rambling tales about nothing in particular.

By Agni, how he missed him.

Instead he was here, in the palace, sitting across from a sister who somehow hoped to use his dreams against him. But Zuko had spent the last three years perfecting the art of dreaming in silence, so that those around him would never hear him whimper or cry out in his sleep. He knew that his guards wouldn’t have been able to tell his sister anything significant about his nightmares, and Uncle had successfully drilled it into his head that they weren’t his shame to bear.

He wasn’t the one who had burned and scarred a _child_.

“What about them?” he asked.

“It would appear that your time away from home has made you shameless as well as weak,” Azula said archly. “Have you so resigned yourself to your weakness that you don’t even try to hide it anymore? If it makes you feel better, I’ve been told I am excellent nightmare material.”

Zuko blinked. Did she really think that he had nightmares about _her?_

“You’re not the one in my nightmares,” he told her quietly.

Her brows furrowed, but she didn’t ask him who else he would dream about. Even now that he was absent—his bending stripped, his sanity gone, and his titles lost—their father’s presence still lingered between them.

A bridge and a barrier, all at once.

“Wrong answer,” Azula said, cocking her head at him. “Haven’t you realized by now? You have much more reason to fear me now than you ever did our dearest father.”

“You’re wrong,” he told her.

Her eyes, ever so quickly, flicked to somewhere over his shoulder. When he turned his head to look behind him, there was no one there, but when he glanced back at her, her face was contorted with rage.

“How _dare_ you?” she spat, leaning forward across the table. “Father is rotting away in some Earth Kingdom prison with no bending or power to speak of, and I am right here and my bending is stronger than _ever._ Have you’ve forgotten what kind of monster I am? Are you asking for some sort of demonstration?”

Zuko felt the first little curl of fear flicker in his stomach. He forced himself not to flinch back, and met her eyes unwaveringly.

“You are not our father, ’Zula,” he told her, fighting to keep his voice even.

Azula snarled, and lunged across the table with lightning speed. She seized his hands so tightly that he could feel the tiny bones in his fingers grinding against each other. He was frozen, staring with wide eyes at the teacups, which had been knocked out of the way when she had moved. The crash of them shattering into fine pieces against the floor rang in his ears.

“You’re right,” she hissed, voice low and deadly, and her face was mere inches from his own when he dared to look up at her. “I am _so much more_.”

To Zuko’s credit, he did not scream.

He stayed silent, even when the blue glow of heat began to shine from her skin. Even when the warmth in her palms flared into a searing, burning, all-encompassing _heat_ , and he was too scared to look down at his hands, terrified that they’d be on fire. Instead, everything in him locked into place—his hands in her crushing grip, his breath frozen in his lungs, his heart stopped in his chest, his gaze on her face—because there was only one other time anyone had done this, had held him in place an heated their skin ever-so-slowly to burn his own, and suddenly he was thirteen, and on his knees, with tears streaming down his face and fire reflected in his eyes—

Some time, either seconds or minutes or _years_ later, he drew in a staggering, aching breath. And then shakily took in the fact that he was curled into a ball on the floor—or as close to one as he could manage. His hands were cradled against his chest, stinging fiercely, and his ribs ached as if he’d just run a marathon while underwater, and he was still too afraid to look at his hands.

From Azula’s cackling, ringing out from somewhere in front of him, she’d taken incredible pleasure in his panic. He hadn’t had an episode like that, or an ‘attack,’ the way Uncle described it, in ages.

He would _not_ give her this.

Zuko was hot with _fury_ as he pushed himself up, first onto his elbows and then into a sitting position. It was childish and all-too familiar for Azula to use him as a punching bag any time he struck a little too close to home. She could beat him and she could burn him and she could scream at him as much as she wanted, but nothing she could ever do to him would be able to surpass what his father had put him through.

He had no other mother to take away; no illusion of fatherly affection to chase; no reputation to destroy; no throne to steal. All Azula had over him was his body, and he had more than enough experience dealing with pain.

“If you think hurting me will make me fear you the way you want me to,” he gasped, meeting her cool gaze with a glare, “then you really never learned anything from father, after all.”

Azula grinned at him. “We’ll see about that,” she said in a sing-song voice.

Zuko counted his way carefully through three more breaths, trying to ignore how his heart kept stuttering in his chest and screaming at him that he was in _danger_. On the last exhale, he forced himself to look down at his hands.

They were…not nearly as bad as he’d feared. The burns barely even looked deep enough to scar.

He looked back up at his sister, at the impassive expression she was so desperately clinging onto. Azula was nothing if not a firebending prodigy. Every ounce of damage that she dealt with her flames was intentional. And it didn’t make sense for her to have qualms about burning anyone; by all reports, she’d lashed out at and burned servants multiple times.

As terrified as he was, as much as his hands still smarted, and as fucked up as the whole situation was, the truth was that she’d held back.

Mercy was a relative thing. Most importantly, it was _rare_ when it came to his family, and especially when it came to Azula. She’d claimed multiple times that he didn’t deserve her mercy, and yet she had given it to him during their Agni Kai, and again now.

So he took a leap.

“I forgive you for burning me,” he said.

He was still in pain, and his body was still telling him to panic. It was taking every ounce of his consciousness to keep himself calm, when everything in him was vying for him to lash out at her in anger for hurting him.

Giving his baby sister a chance was taking more strength than it had taken him to face an actual _dragon_ , and that was saying something.

Azula paused. “You’re insane,” she said, but it lacked her usual vitriol. “Do you need me to burn you _again?”_

“I’ll still forgive you,” he said, praying desperately that Agni would help keep his voice from wavering. “Burning me won’t change the fact that you’re my sister.”

When this was all over, he was going to find Uncle and hug him so hard the old man’s back broke, because this shit was a _million_ times harder than he had ever made it look.

Something flickered across Azula’s face, something foreign and almost vulnerable, but then her expression shuttered.

“Take him back to his rooms,” she snapped.

Ri was by his side in an instant, and Zuko knew better than to fight him this time when strong hands quickly pulled him up and away from his sister. Azula was too volatile right then for him to fight every battle she tried to pick with him, but he wasn’t sure if it would be sustainable for her to lash out at him every time they made any sort of progress. At this rate, it would take them decades to get anywhere, and—he felt a little bubble of hysterical laughter rise up in his throat at the thought—he would run out of skin for her to burn.

“I’m sorry,” Ri gasped, once they had made it into the hallway, and when Zuko craned his head back to peer up at him, his face was as white as a sheet. “Highness, I’m so sorry, I—”

He’d probably been frightened by Azula’s display of cruelty, and Zuko instinctively tried to reach out and pat him reassuringly. He stopped, looking at his burned hands, and curled them back up against his chest again. They still hurt, but he was still buzzing with too much adrenaline for him to feel it fully; right then, the pain felt a bit like a muffled ringing noise. He could tell it was there, but at the same time it felt incredibly far away.

“It’s alright,” he told him softly. “It’s not your fault, and—and at least no one else got hurt.”

Ri’s grip on him tightened, and he fell silent. But even if he’d tried to help him, back in the tearoom, it would’ve just incensed his sister even more and put both of them in further danger. Zuko hoped that he wouldn’t blame himself for it.

He must have still been a little dazed, because all he did was blink and suddenly they were bursting through the doors to his rooms. There were a few servants inside, cleaning during his absence, and they and the guards stationed there fell silent upon their entrance.

Iyemi was organizing her supplies by his bed. She took one look at Ri’s expression, and then at Zuko’s hands, and started rummaging through her materials.

“Bed,” she said, face grim but professional.

Ri stepped over and set Zuko down delicately, as if he were made from glass and on the verge of shattering. He appreciated it, if only because it didn’t jostle his hands. Everyone else in the room, perhaps sensing that Iyemi had gone into her element, drew back to give them space, though they kept staring with wide eyes.

“Let me see your hands, Highness,” Iyemi said, and she sounded almost upset, the same way Ri had, which made no sense.

Even when he let her take a gentle hold of his wrists, she refused to meet his eyes. Neither she nor Ri had been in any position to stop his sister, and _he’d_ been the one to purposefully prod and poke at her fully knowing how violent she could be.

“It’s alright,” he tried to tell her. “It’s not that bad. I don’t even think it’ll scar.”

She didn’t respond, lips thinning, even though he knew he was right. He had enough experience with burns, and with Azula’s burns—from when she’d been a spiteful child and had evolved from poking and pinching to little singes here and there—in particular, to know these weren’t very severe. They would sting, and his skin felt raw, but they’d heal quickly.

After inspecting the burns, Iyemi raised her head. “I need—”

“I brought water,” said one of the servants, a boy, who must’ve slipped in and out of the room when they hadn’t been paying attention. He was holding a wooden bowl in one hand and a cloth in the other. “And the gentlest soap we have.”

Iyemi shot him a look, but beckoned him forward.

“What’s your name?” Zuko asked, and bit back a wince as Iyemi started gently wiping at one of his hands. The boy was young, couldn’t have been much older than Zuko was. The palace had never hired children before; maybe Azula had been forced to lower the age restrictions when she’d insisted on replacing all of the old staff.

“Tozi, Your Highness,” the boy said, and then shyly added, “I can help with the other hand. My mom’s a medic and I used to help her work.”

He looked to Iyemi, who gave him a critical once-over, but then turned back to her work; the clearest sign of acceptance that they were likely to get from her.

“Thank you,” Zuko told him, as he got to work.

Tozi’s hands faltered briefly, but he gave him the tiniest of smiles before returning to his task. Zuko took a deep breath and let his head fall back against his pillow so he couldn’t see his hands—the sight of burned skin turned his stomach, even then—and focused the rest of his energy on not twitching as they cleaned his wounds. The soap stung, but their ministrations were gentle, and he did his best not to think of how similar this was to how the ship’s healer had treated him right after his banishment.

What stung the most was that Azula had definitely done this with the intention of bringing up those sorts of memories. She’d known that burning him, and burning him like _that_ , would be a thousand times worse for him than if she’d simply starved him or beaten him or hurt him any other way.

And she’d done it not in spite of, but because, of that fact.

“She didn’t get as angry as she did last time,” he said, almost conversationally, hoping that saying it out loud would help it feel more real. “And she didn’t hurt me nearly as much as she could have. I think she was trying to see if she could make me hate her.”

No one answered him for a moment.

“Do you hate her? Highness?” Tozi asked cautiously.

“No,” he replied, and was relieved that that, at least, came easily to him. “I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to.”

He felt like he was trying to be to his sister what Uncle had been to him, all those years ago. Except Uncle had been amazing at being an unwavering force of kindness and understanding and patience, and Zuko was—well. He was still working on the kind, understanding part, and patience had never been his strong suit.

It was just so _tempting_ to shout at Azula every time they took one step forward and she marched them another ten steps back. To yell in her face about how frustrating it was when every conversation he tried to have with her ended in an explosion of fire and rage.

Anger was so easy and it was _so_ familiar, but he was terrified that if he gave into it for even a split second that he would lose any chance with her. By keeping him around, either intentionally or unintentionally, she was giving him a second chance at salvaging the twisted thing that was their relationship—which had been manipulated and malformed by their father’s hands before it even had the time to fully form—and he was terrified of losing that chance.

“She’s still my _sister,_ ” he added, as if that could make sense of his apparent death wish.

He felt like it explained just about everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just for fun let's keep a little tally called "how many servants have mentally adopted zuko" at the end of every chapter. it's currently four, and they're all trying to keep cool while whispering "what the fuck, he is a CHILD, what the fuck" under their breath the whole time.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a little reminder about the "graphic depictions of violence" tag, it comes into play a bit in this chapter.

The next morning, when Azula woke, she sent a servant to tell her brother to join her for breakfast.

She spent the next hour getting ready and all but thrumming with anticipation. Zuko had been too out of it in the moment to properly react to what she had done to him. It was the only thing that could explain his wretched babbling about forgiveness and whatnot, aside from a mental break.

Only a fool would look in the eyes of someone who had just burned him and forgive them just like that.

So she wanted to see how he would treat her, now that she had shown her true colors. The twisting in her stomach was anticipation, not fear, because she felt no remorse over what she had done. Remorse implied that she’d been in the wrong, when instead she’d taught a necessary and valuable lesson: that the Fire Lord needed to be respected.

Azula had shown her true colors, and had demanded his fear and respect. Today, she would receive what she had asked for.

But when Zuko showed up to her rooms an hour later, carried in once more by a guard, the first thing he did was smile at her.

“Good morning, Azula,” he said pleasantly, as if last night had never happened.

The way he was looking at her, all of his emotions painted so clearly across his face, was all too reminiscent of yesterday. Just the memory of it made her blood run hot with fury—even with his burned hands clutched protectively to his chest, he’d stared up at her, gaze earnest and open, as if he’d _cared_. As if he’d summoned her with his weakness, their mother had materialized just behind him, and then it had been not one but _two_ beseeching, lying gazes trained on her, and she had had enough.

How dare they look at her that way? How dare they pretend to care, after all that she had done to make them drop the act?

So she didn’t respond, and simply took a sip of her tea.

Across the table, one of the servants who had come in with Zuko stepped forward to sit by him. She glanced over towards Azula with an expression that she couldn’t quite place—she just knew it was different from the fear she was used to, and it unsettled her. Azula watched curiously as she used chopsticks to pick up a bite of egg, but her confusion blossomed into understanding when the servant brought it carefully to Zuko’s mouth.

Oh.

Her brother accepted the food as if it were no matter; then again, he’d spent several days too weak to use his arms, so perhaps he’d grown used to such humiliation. The only hint of his discomfort was the way he stared resolutely at the food in front of him as he chewed.

“Thank you, Sei,” he murmured, and then looked up at Azula. His shoulders hunched slightly, as if he were bracing for a comment about his hands.

Azula kept her eyes very carefully on his face, and reminded herself that he’d needed to be taught a lesson. That Fire Lords were never wrong. Once she was sure she had schooled her expression perfectly, she took a bite of food.

“I’ve been thinking of adding more panda lilies to the gardens,” she said, as nonchalantly as possible.

Zuko started, as she’d predicted he would. He took his time to finish chewing his current bite before speaking.

“I liked those a lot when I was little,” he said slowly.

He was smart enough, at least, not to mention just who else had loved those flowers. Just who had motivated their father to set all of them aflame, just shortly after Zuko’s tenth birthday. Azula could remember watching them burn. Zuko had cried for the memories he had with those flowers.

She had just stared as they’d burned and had desperately wished to have any memories of them to cry over.

It had become a pattern, then, as their father had purged the entire rest of the palace of traces of that woman: for Zuko to cry, and for Azula to wish she could.

Still, for a second, they could both pretend that Zuko’s love for panda lilies and Azula’s careful indifference towards them had nothing to do with their mother. In that way, it was the closest thing to a non-contentious topic that she could think of.

“Once they’re planted,” he began, hesitantly, “would you like to go see them together?”

And here they’d arrived at what Azula had planned, but his expression was so full of hope that it struck her like a gaping wound, and she hadn’t prepared for that. She clicked her tongue despite herself.

“And do you plan on crawling alongside me while I walk?” she asked, tone scathing. “Though I suppose it does suit you.”

The cruelty, at least, was comfortable.

Once upon a time, a comment like that would’ve been enough to make her brother wilt, and maybe even cry. Then he would have found himself wrapped up in their mother’s arms, while she would have found herself being scolded.

(It had almost been worth it, sometimes, just to hear her voice say her name.)

But they weren’t the same children they used to be, and Zuko’s spine straightened instead of crumpling. Ever since she’d become Fire Lord, he didn’t rise to her words the way he used to. It was distinctly unsettling.

“Then I’ll get better, and stronger,” he said resolutely. “So that we can walk together. Wouldn’t that be nice, ’Zula?”

She firmly told herself no.

“Isn’t it a bit presumptuous of you to assume I’d even want to waste that much time in your presence?” she asked archly, trying to keep the upper hand in the conversation.

“Well, I’d like to spend more time with you,” he replied, and maybe he hadn’t changed at all, because he was still as stupid and naïve and sappy as he’d been in his childhood.

And he was still a liar.

“Please,” she scoffed. “If you’re going to lie, at least do it convincingly.”

“Is this where you start trying to convince me that you’re a monster?” he asked tiredly. “You’ve never taken pleasure in your cruelty, Azula. If you’re a monster, that makes you a shitty one.”

She was taken aback, but then she thought of all the times she had made him cry as a child, and of the hollow satisfaction that had filled her, even as she’d forced her lips into a smile. Zuko was stupid, and he was dumb, and he was oblivious; he always had been. She hated him for seeing the world so simply, and so _wrongly_. She hated that he could say that so sincerely, as if he believed it.

Most of all, she hated that she knew she was lying when she told herself that there was no truth to his words.

“And what about last night?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. Anything to bring this derailed conversation back on track to more comfortable, more familiar, topics. “Were you too far gone to hear my laughter? How’s that for pleasure?”

He didn’t back down.

“If you’re so happy about it,” he challenged, “how come you haven’t been able to look at my hands once this entire time?"

Azula didn’t respond to that. She didn’t know how.

He was wrong, he had to be, because Zuko was stupid and nothing he ever did or thought turned out right. But when she tried to force her eyes down to where she knew she would see bandages, all that filled her vision was the blackened, charred mess of a thirteen-year-old’s eye as he lay on the floor of the Agni Kai chamber—

She looked away.

“You will be taken to the Capital City Prison this afternoon,” she announced, desperate to change the topic to something that would distract him from how uncomfortable she was. “You will have a limited amount of time to speak to the waterbender peasant before you will be returned to the palace.”

Even though she had dictated it like an order, the way Zuko’s eyes lit up made it feel like a concession.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It’s only so she can see how pathetic you’ve come with her own eyes,” she snapped, hackles raising even as she chided herself for getting angry. “She didn’t believe me when I told her myself.”

The lie rang false in both their ears. This and the garden were the only things she could give him that mattered, and they both knew it.

Zuko’s infuriatingly happy little smile didn’t disappear for the entire rest of the meal. Despite how it made her blood pressure rise, the rest of breakfast was…surprisingly civil, as far as time with her brother seemed to be concerned these days.

Throughout the whole meal, her flames didn’t appear even once.

* * *

The Capital City Prison was located on the far side of the caldera—to reach it from the palace, one must cross the entirety of the Capital. Out of some small measure of kindness, Azula had called him a palanquin, to save him the indignity of being carried in public.

Zuko would have much preferred to make the walk on his own two legs, but Agni was working against him on that one. Progress, when it came to his legs’ strength, had been infuriatingly slow compared to the speedy recovery of his upper body. Iyemi told him that his relatively quick improvement was likely only due to the sheer force of his stubbornness. He believed it; the only times he gave up on any of the exercises she guided him through were when cramps forced him to, or when she made him stop. No amount of exhaustion or pain was otherwise enough to derail him.

He _would_ walk again.

But for now, he would be carried by Ri, and by three of the other guards typically stationed in his room, in what felt like little more than a gilded cage. It was, at least, a relief to have familiar, sympathetic faces around him. By then, he knew his guards’ names, and where they had served before coming to the palace, and whatever little tidbits about their life where they’d been willing to share.

They helped make the palanquin feel a little less like a trap.

The prison itself was just as ugly on the outside as he had remembered it, but its interior layout had changed considerably. The security had also doubled, at least, and Zuko wryly wondered if Uncle was to thank for that one.

It would certainly make what he had to do a lot harder.

“We’re here, Highness,” came Ri’s voice, as the palanquin drew to a halt.

Right.

He thanked the guards who had carried him all this way, and in return they were very careful not to stare as Ri lifted him up and out of the palanquin. As he did so, a thought occurred to him.

“Ri,” he murmured, “can you please help me try to stand?”

“Of course, Highness,” Ri said, after only a brief hesitation.

Zuko knew his legs were nowhere near strong enough to bear his own weight, but he _had_ made progress over the past several days. And there was something that was a little too unbearable about the idea of being carried inside the cell like an infant. There was some measure of dignity that he wished to have when facing Katara.

His failure with the Agni Kai had been humiliation enough.

So he set his jaw as his legs were lowered to the floor, for the first time since he could remember. Ri’s hands moved expertly, one wrapping around his waist and the other guiding Zuko’s arm to wrap around his shoulders. He straightened, and most of Zuko’s weight lifted off of the ground with him. His muscles strained, even under barely any of his own weight, and his knees threatened to buckle, but he remained standing out of his own sheer willpower. Together with Ri’s help, they more or less walked inside the cell.

He was not prepared for what he saw.

Logically, he knew that there was a reason the Fire Nation didn’t take waterbender prisoners anymore. That even keeping Katara alive had made Azula more merciful than her predecessors. He had known it wouldn’t be pretty.

But the room around them was positively frigid, and the air around them was so dry his throat felt sore just standing there. And Katara knelt in the center, bound in place on all sides with chains that stretched taut to the walls around her. Her hands were encased in metal, to prevent even the possibility of bloodbending. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how much pain she must be in, to be chained in that position so long.

He had spent too long stuck in the terror of being trapped within his own body, unable to move his arms or legs. It was like a physical blow to his chest, to know that Katara would be able to empathize with him.

“Katara,” he whispered, and her eyes shot up to meet his.

Her face was lined with exhaustion and pallid with defeat, and her body sagged in her chains. She looked _broken_ in a way that Zuko had only seen once before—when he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, in Ba Sing Se. It made something in the pit of his stomach feel like it had fallen away, leaving a nauseous absence in its place.

But the tiniest bit of a spark sprung to life in her eyes, as she looked at him.

And oh, how he had missed her.

“Zuko,” she breathed. Her eyes tracked along his face, and then down, to his hands, and to his legs, where they trembled despite his best efforts. They filled with tears. “Zuko, I am so, so sorry.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed. It was so unbelievably _Katara,_ to be apologizing for what he had brought on himself, even while she was in unspeakable pain. Even when he was the one who had failed her, not the other way around.

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” he told her quietly. “If—if there was even the slightest chance, that they would listen to me, you know I would—”

“It’s alright,” she said. “I know you would help me if you could.”

He’d been prepared for her anger, or even her disappointment, but he hadn’t prepared for the sheer _compassion_ lining her face. How was it that she took care of him so effortlessly, even when she was the one who needed it the most?

“I’m the one who’s supposed to be comforting you,” he said wetly, rubbing at the frustrated tears pricking at his eyes.

She just smiled sadly.

There was a chair set up, in anticipation of his arrival, a few feet from where Katara sat. Ri helped him into it gently, and then drew back, hovering uncertainly.

Zuko cleared his throat.

“Ri, would you mind giving us a moment in private?” he asked, and then held his breath, unsure if he would grant his request but all too aware that everything he had planned hinged on it.

His voice had cracked slightly when he’d spoken, and it had been unintentional, but he was glad for it when he saw the way Ri’s eyes softened. He dipped his head, and padded out of the cell. Zuko blinked in his chair, heart pounding and trying his best to hold himself perfectly still.

The door clanged shut.

“Zuko, has Azula told you about Aang?” Katara rasped.

He was distracted with pulling his chair as close to her as he could manage, and paused to look up at her in confusion.

“She hasn’t told me anything,” he said slowly. Something was _wrong_ about the tone of Katara’s voice, something was horribly wrong, but he didn’t know what it was.

Katara’s eyes filled with tears.

“She said that Aang is—that he’s—”

It clicked into place suddenly, and Zuko’s heart clenched with a flare of sheer panic, as white-hot as lightning, even as he fervently told himself it couldn’t be true.

“Azula always lies, Katara,” he told her fiercely—

_—even as he remembered Azula lying to him and mother about Azulon’s order to kill him, either bragging or warning, he could never tell, and how he’d spent almost a decade hating her for it until his father had confirmed it had been true all along—_

—but this could not be true, because if it was and Aang was no longer in this world then Zuko knew he could not live with himself.

“Think about it,” he said, desperately. “If he was really gone, why hasn’t Azula bragged to me about it? If he was really dead, she’d have lorded it over me the second I woke up. You know she would have.”

Katara didn’t look fully convinced, but she had always been such an optimist, and even then he could see her starting to cling to whatever little shred of hope he was offering.

“Look,” he said, voice low, “I’ve been told that Ba Sing Se is still standing, and I think Aang must be with the others there. But there must be something wrong, because he hasn’t come to take out Azula yet. I’m going to get you out of here, and then you need to get to Ba Sing Se and figure out why.”

“You’re coming with me,” she demanded.

She had always refused to leave anyone behind, but sometimes it was _necessary._

Zuko carefully reached around her, fingers searching for where the metal enclosed her hands behind her back. Despite the bandages serving as a barrier to protect his skin, it still stung when he began to heat the steel, keeping his fire low and steady.

“If I can weaken the metal enough,” he whispered, “I think you can break your hands free. But I can’t come with you, because Azula doubled security in anticipation of my visit. You’ll need to wait until at least nightfall, once it’s back to normal—”

Katara groaned lowly in pain, and he jerked back, an apology already on his lips.

“This isn’t going to work,” she hissed, and kept going even when he began to protest. “They don’t keep any water on this floor, as a precaution. I’d need to get past the guards in order to heal myself, but I can’t bend without my hands.”

When he glanced around her body, he could see that the metal was only barely glowing with heat—not nearly hot enough to be pliable. He ground his teeth in frustration, clenching his useless hands into tight fists even though it pulled at his skin.

She was right.

“I won’t fail again,” he vowed. “I promise, I’ll figure a way to get you out of those and come back.”

The cell door slid open just as Katara had opened her mouth to answer him, and she snapped it shut with an audible click. Ri, at least, had the sense to give them an apologetic look as he approached them.

Zuko took a terse breath, trying to relax even though his shoulders were tensed with aggravation. He didn’t know how long it would be until Azula let him back in to see Katara, and though he hadn’t really had much of a plan, he hadn’t expected it to fail so quickly.

But he knew one thing: he wouldn’t squander his next chance. He would figure out how to bend metal without burning Katara, and he would get her out. He could even try to build up enough trust with Azula to convince her to unknowingly make Katara’s escape from the Capital easier.

“Please stay safe, Zuko,” she begged him, glancing down at his bandaged hands again. “Please don’t do anything to make her angry.”

“I won’t,” he promised, because she needed to hear it even if it was a lie.

He gave her a small smile as Ri lifted him to his feet and began to shuffle him towards the door.

He couldn’t even begin to describe what he was attempting with his sister. Then again, he wasn’t sure that anyone but him—not even Azula herself—understood.

* * *

That night, Azula dreamt of the Agni Kai. She was sitting in the stands, her blundering fool of an uncle seated next to her, and her stomach roiled with a tension that she told herself was anticipation and not dread.

Zuko turned, and the blood drained from his face. Ozai strode towards him. Azula watched.

His eyes widened in horror, and he scrambled into a low bow. Their father towered over him, a god next to a child. He demanded that he fight. Azula watched.

She had seen many expressions cross her brother’s face—the soft smile reserved only for animals and their mother, and Azula but only on special occasions; the twisted anger whenever he got frustrated; sometimes even tears, when she provoked him enough to cry. But none of the expressions she’d ever seen were anything like this, when Zuko tipped his head back and pleaded with their father with tears streaming down his cheeks, gleaming in the light of the Fire Lord’s power.

Azula was barely ten, and her brother barely thirteen, and she was frozen in place in her seat and when this was over they would have to chip her out from it because she would never move again.

Ozai’s face contorted into some twisted imitation of benevolence. When he reached out to cradle Zuko’s face in one hand, her stupid, _stupid_ brother let out a pathetic little half-gasp, and leaned into his touch. He was too blind to see it coming but she _could._

The room was completely silent, and to call out to her brother would be a death wish, but she prayed desperately to a god she did not believe in for her brother to survive this.

Agni did not listen.

Her uncle turned his head, but Azula bit her tongue and _watched_ as her father’s palm wreathed itself in flames and he lit her brother’s face on fire. Zuko’s screams echoed around the room, almost inhuman in their agony, and her lips were stretched so tightly across her face, a wretched facsimile of a smile, that she half expected to taste blood on her tongue.

There was no blood where Ozai’s hand met her brother’s face. His fire did not extinguish, and Zuko’s skin blistered, and then melted, and then charred, and he stopped screaming.

His body crumpled to the floor as soon as he was released, and there was a gaping crater where the left side of his face was supposed to be.

Azula’s smile widened, because it was the only thing she _could_ do, and the smell of singed flesh and charred bone burned away at her nose, and she just smiled _wider_ , and her face was splitting in two and then—

“Azula?”

—she woke up.

“Azula?” came a tentative voice, the one that had woken her in the first place, for the second time.

She sat up immediately, because no one should be able to speak with that much of their face—that much of their _brain_ —burned away. But this, too, must be a dream. Like all the other times. Because Zuko wasn’t here, he never was, no matter how many times she brought him back he would always leave—

“Come in,” she called, and if her voice broke, it was only because she was exhausted.

The doors swung inwards, and Zuko was standing there, arm slung around that favorite guard of his.

Azula drank in the angry, twisted handprint of a scar that stretched itself across half of his face. It was funny. His cheekbone was still there, like it hadn’t burned to ash. And so was his eye, like it hadn’t popped and melted in his socket before the socket itself, too, had burned. And his brain was hidden away inside his skull like it was supposed to be, not leaking out onto the scorched floor.

And he was staring at her like he wasn’t a dead man walking, eyes narrowing in confusion and then alarm.

“Azula, are you okay?” he asked.

What part of this was okay, she wanted to yell at him. How could any of this be okay when it had never been that way to begin with.

“What are you doing here?” she asked instead, running a hand over her face.

“...I had a nightmare,” he mumbled, and his eyes flicked away from her and then back again. “I needed to see for myself that you were alright.”

Her mouth opened, to deliver something scathing about him being little more than a child crying to their mother about a dream of a scary monster, and then she snapped it shut. Because now that she was paying attention to the way he was acting instead of his intact skull, she could see that he was looking at her just the way she’d been looking at him.

As if she were a ghost.

“And you thought this dream warranted waking the Fire Lord?” she asked as neutrally as she could. Her eyes tracked over to the guard holding her brother up. “ _Both_ of you?”

Watching her brother’s skin and bone burn to ash had been unsettling, even if the punishment was a lesson that he’d desperately needed—Ozai had made sure she’d known that. But the way that the guard tensed, breath hitching, when she addressed him, was so familiar it was almost comforting. His eyes held the same vapid fear that every other person in this miserable palace had whenever they looked at her. It was the perfect type of fear to be molded into what her father had always called _respect_.

“Ri, can you help me to the bed, please,” Zuko said, and to her utter consternation the guard obeyed him. As if sensing her indignation, he glanced up. “Don’t be mad at him, Azula, you know how annoying I can be when I want something.”

“Because you’re too stupid to know when to admit defeat,” she sniffed, and narrowed her eyes at him as he all but collapsed onto _her_ bed. “And who said that you could stay?”

He shrugged.

“Nobody said that I couldn’t.”

This was where Azula was meant to tell him to get the fuck out. She was the _Fire Lord,_ and he was a disgrace whose title had only been restored because she had let it. He was not allowed to come disturb her sleep as if she were at his beck and call. She was the one in control, here.

She did not tell him to leave.

Zuko broke the silence only once the door had swung shut, leaving them alone and in the dark.

“I dreamed that Father was angry with you,” he began, staring at some point far off in the distance as he spoke. “I told him that you’d lied about the Avatar when I left during the eclipse, and I dreamed that he was so angry that he burned you the way he—”

He did not finish. He didn’t need to.

Azula sat silently as he took a deep breath, and started again.

“I wanted so badly to take you with me, when I left,” he confessed. “The thought of leaving you alone with—with him, was almost unbearable.”

Her mask of indifference almost slipped, which was an unforgivable mistake, because if Zuko had seen then no force in this world would be able to stop him until he had poked and prodded all of her wounds into the open. It didn’t help that every time he opened his stupid mouth it was like this—as much as he fumbled his words, he always managed to strike right at the heart of every little thing that she had never forgiven him for.

That she had never forgiven herself for.

And, top at the list of everything that her idiot of a traitorous brother had done, was leaving her—leaving her Nation—right at the moment of her greatest weakness. After she had given him a second chance to return home and start again.

It was something that she would _never_ forgive him for.

“I would have killed you, if you’d tried,” she scoffed. “For daring to suggest that I’d betray my Nation like you did.”

“But you haven’t had much luck with bringing yourself to kill me,” Zuko pointed out, his lips quirking in a wry smile.

A few days ago, she would’ve tossed her hair and sneered that it was only because his life had _strategic value_. But right then, sitting side by side in the darkness of her room, it was as if no other person in the world aside from the two of them existed.

As if he had never left her.

She said nothing.

“Did he get angry, after the eclipse?” he asked, as if he were bracing himself for the answer. “Did he hurt you?”

Azula hums, thinking back to a face of fury and the only time Ozai had ever, _ever_ struck her.

“No,” she told him, once she was sure her voice wouldn’t crack.

The lie hung between them in the air, an obvious, ugly thing. When their eyes met, she understood too much of the _exhaustion_ in Zuko’s eyes, and had the sudden feeling that he saw her a little too clearly for comfort. As much as their father had driven them apart, it was ironic that they were the only two people alive who could understand the weight of his afterimage.

They had both seen a bit more than they should have, and at the hands of the same man.

“Did you have a dream, ’Zula?” he asked, then.

“I’m sure I’ve dreamed at some point, yes,” she said.

Any hopes that her sarcastic tone would be enough to distract herself from his unsettling gaze were dashed quickly. He was giving her that look that she _hated_ —all sad and knowing, as if she were anything like him. Too close to something resembling pity for her liking.

“But you’re shaking,” he said quietly.

Which was. True. But it could mean anything.

“I’m cold,” she told him stubbornly, clenching her hands into fists and cursing him for noticing. “It wasn’t a nightmare.”

She was sick of him trying to create weaknesses where she had none. She wasn’t like him, weak and sniveling and pathetic; she was strong in all the ways he was weak. It was below a Fire Lord, after all, to have something as childish as _nightmares_. And Azula was nothing if not less than perfect when it came to her duty to her Nation. Her brother’s audacity to assume otherwise was outright insulting.

(And so achingly familiar.)

“I didn’t say it was,” Zuko reminded her, cocking his head to one side. “What was it about?”

Azula hoped, very suddenly and savagely, that the truth he had prodded so much for would hurt him. Maybe even enough to deter him from pressing further. If he wanted to know what she had dreamt about so desperately, without knowing just what he was asking for, then she was happy to deliver.

“Your failure of an Agni Kai,” she told him, relishing in his flinch. “And how pathetic it was, the way you begged and cried and how you _screamed_ when he didn’t stop--”

He had the _nerve_ to reach out and grasp her hand, and she stared at where his fingers wrapped around hers with wide, disbelieving eyes. The healer must have taken off his bandages. His healing skin was discolored, and it was incredibly soft against her own, and it was warm and _alive._ Something inside her quieted.

She hadn’t even realized until that moment that it had been screaming.

“He would never have done that to me,” she insisted, even though he hadn’t asked. “I never failed him the way you did, I never let him.”

Because Azula wasn’t a failure, the way Zuko had been. She hadn’t just been good, she’d been _perfect,_ because as long as she was perfect her father would never look at her the way he’d looked at Zuko. So she had mastered lightning before her fourteenth birthday had even passed, and had poured every ounce of her rage and sense of duty into her flames until they had burned blue with her passion.

Her father hadn’t hurt her, because she’d never given him the chance.

“No, you didn’t,” Zuko laughed ruefully. “But he can’t hurt either of us anymore.”

She’d been telling herself that, ever since the news had come of Ozai’s defeat and subsequent imprisonment in Ba Sing Se. But it had felt hollow then, and it felt hollow now, because he had hurt them for fourteen and sixteen years, and no amount of energybending could take that away. The Avatar could destroy their father’s body, but even he couldn’t remove his presence from where it still loomed over both of them.

The way Zuko acted made it seem like he’d escaped it, sometimes.

But she knew he had to be pretending.

“I didn’t look away, you know,” Azula told him desperately.

The words spilled out of her almost against their will, as if she had dammed them up for too long and they were bursting free because of it. When she looked up at him, he was gazing back at her sadly, and she didn’t need to elaborate further for him to know what she was talking about.

“Your fool of an uncle looked away before he—” She cut herself off, and then continued. “But I didn’t.”

“That must have been an awful thing for you to have to see,” he said softly.

The smell had actually been the worst part of all. It had filled the entire room, the sickening scent of wizened, burned flesh, and had stained her clothes for _months_ afterwards. No amount of scrubbing or soaking in the royal spa had been able to lift it from her skin. Even then, with him sitting across from her, she could almost smell its faint remnants.

She shrugged. “I’m sure it was worse to experience it.”

Zuko laughed, then. When she looked over at him, wondering what sort of face could accompany such a sharp and brittle noise, his eyes glimmered at her. They were too bright, even in the darkness. They’d always been the color of pale gold, just like their mother’s.

Azula’s had always been a simple brown. One of the many ways she’d taken more after her father.

“I wouldn’t know,” he told her. “I can’t remember.”

Azula did not understand, because every tiniest little detail about every second of that Agni-forsaken duel was emblazoned so deeply into the recesses of her brain that she half suspected she would be able to remember it even if she had forgotten her own name. Even in her next life.

“Uncle tells me that happens, sometimes,” he continued, picking at her sheets with his free hand. “That your brain blocks out the trauma.”

Something deep in the back of her mind said, _good._

“Don’t let daddy dearest catch wind of that,” she told him. “Something tells me he wouldn’t be too pleased.”

Zuko laughed, again. It wasn’t the same way he’d laughed, before the Agni Kai, but it was the closest to it that he’d ever sounded since.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to keep the Fire Lord up any longer,” he said, patting her hand gently. “Ri, can you please come in here?”

And before Azula could do something weak and stupid, like grab his hand again or tell him to stay, the doors creaked open and the guard from before was making his way towards them. So instead she clasped her hands in her lap and sat very still, watching with keen eyes as her brother was gently lifted away from her.

She’d at least chosen his personal guard well; she could see it in the delicacy with which he handled her brother, and in the wariness with which he regarded her. He was toeing a narrow line, one of loyalty and treason, and for his sake she hoped that he wouldn’t fall on the wrong side.

Zuko would undoubtedly be cross with her if she had to banish his favorite palace guard.

“Good night, ’Zula,” Zuko called softly, raising a hand to wave at her.

Azula kept her eyes trained on the patches of pink skin littering his palm.

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a lot of people use the way azula stared and smiled during zuko's agni kai as evidence of her inherent evilness. i wanted to have a bit of a different take on that, because i feel like azula's perfectionism stems from a fear of ending up like her brother. i think that people don't acknowledge how much the agni kai probably also traumatized azula, as a glaring example of how badly her father would hurt her if she failed to live up to his expectations. i also like the idea of azula refusing to look away from the horror and discomfort of zuko's scarring out of some measure of respect or caring for him, in that she refused to minimize or overlook his suffering.


	5. Chapter Five

Zuko’s hands took around three days to heal.

As much as Sei and Tozi and all of the other servants had been wonderfully sensitive about the whole thing, and as much as he’d trusted them, it was still an overwhelming relief once his hands were back to normal. He’d spent so much time working with Iyemi to get to the point where he could even use his hands again. Having his agency taken away again, even if just for a few days, had made him feel worrisomely like he’d fallen back to square one.

Early in the morning on this third day, right after Iyemi had declared him fit to use his hands once more, Azula summoned him to her rooms. He’d expected them to have breakfast together, again. But when Ri helped him into the room, he was instead greeted with a small swarm of bustling servants.

In the midst of that swarm, standing perfectly still while various hands poked and pulled at her clothes and hair, stood his sister. Her eyes snapped up to look at him, and when she saw his clear confusion the corners of her mouth turned up in amusement.

“Good morning, Azula,” he said, when it became clear that he would have to be the one to break the silence.

“Yes, yes,” she waved him off, and then gestured at one of the servants, who scurried away. “It’s your lucky day, Zuzu. Time for you to finally start earning your keep around here.”

If it had been even a week earlier, her smirk and carefully arched brow would have made the hair on the back of his neck prickle with dread. But Zuko was trying out this whole ‘trust’ thing, and so he forced himself to relax and wait for whatever surprise she was about to deal him. Despite his best efforts, a tiny spark of anxiety shot down his spine.

But then the servant returned, dragging two chairs behind him. Azula arranged herself gracefully in one of them, and the other was set up just behind her. She shot him a playful look, and he understood.

He laughed, shaking his head, and allowed himself to be helped over to the chair.

The offer to do her hair had been made on somewhat of a whim; it had been a surprise when she’d first accepted, and it was even greater of a surprise that she’d remembered it. The agony of his burns had overshadowed his memories of the earlier parts of their dinner together; and ever since he’d visited Katara, his thoughts had been otherwise occupied.

When she’d accepted his offer, he’d seen it as a tentative breakthrough. An admission of some degree of sentimentality, or caring. Though that hope had been dashed by what had happened just moments later, it was admittedly encouraging that she’d bothered to bring it up on her own.

“And what hairstyle would the Fire Lord have today?” he asked. One of the servants, who’d been brushing out Azula’s hair when he’d arrived, wordlessly handed him a gold-trimmed silk ribbon, and blushed fervently when he murmured his thanks to her.

“My usual, of course,” Azula commanded.

Zuko reached out and, slowly, ran newly-healed fingers through her hair. It felt like it had been a thousand years since he’d last done this; at the same time, it felt like it had been only yesterday. There had been a few precious years, when Azula had been around four or five, where she had let him do this. They’d sit in her chambers and she’d prattle on about whatever she had convinced Mai and Ty Lee to do lately while he’d comb through and braid and style her hair.

Of course, once her bending had manifested, and their father had begun taking her under his wing, that had changed. He’d instead found himself the target of more than a few well-placed pinches and burns for enjoying a hobby as 'pathetic' as playing with hair. It had been unbecoming of a crown prince, she had told him gleefully, after a particularly painful singe.

It had been one of the earliest times he could remember hearing his father’s words parroted through his sister’s mouth.

In front of him, though he could not see her face, Azula had gone quiet.

“You’re not here to give me a head massage,” she snapped, after a prolonged moment of silence.

Her words would have stung, but they felt almost harmless in the absence of her typical, biting tone. Gentle was not a word he associated with his sister—she was too strong and too brilliant for that—but it certainly came across as uncharacteristically soft for her.

Then again, just running his fingers through her hair had plummeted him back into the simpler years of their childhood. Perhaps it had been the same for her.

When he said as much, Azula’s shoulders jumped with tension. He all but held his breath, and pushed back the welling fear that he’d provoked her into anger again. That she was going to hurt him again. He knew that her discomfort didn’t necessarily translate to rage, but it was hard to reassure himself when he couldn’t see her expression.

The servants around them had pulled back towards the corners of the room, to give them space. He could make out Ri and Sei’s faces among them, just as keenly tuned towards his sister’s emotions as he was himself. None of them made a sound—no one dared to—but their faces grew more pinched at the quiet that fell over the room. Just like Zuko, they were waiting with bated breath, watching to see if the calm would break out into blue flames.

“The little girl who let you braid her hair is dead,” Azula spat, finally. “She has been for a long time.”

Zuko stilled briefly, before gently pulling her hair up into a ponytail at the crown of her head. She shuddered as his fingers brushed against her scalp.

“I used to think that about the boy I used to be,” he hummed. “I was certain that father had—had burned him away, along with everything else.”

At the mention of the Agni Kai, even as veiled as it was, she tensed further. They hadn’t discussed it since the night of his dream, and it was one thing to mention it in the dark of her chambers when time itself, and even the world outside of the two of them, felt completely unreal. It was another entirely to mention it in the warm wash of Agni’s rays and the prying ears of others only a short distance away.

Still, he continued.

“There are still parts of him in me, like the part of me that enjoys sitting here like this.” Softly, delicately, he added, “I think parts of that little girl could still be in you, too.”

It was the only way he could think of to describe it. He was certain that if Uncle were here, he’d have delivered half a dozen brilliantly worded proverbs in the time it had taken Zuko to stutter out a single sentence. But Uncle wasn’t here, so Zuko’s fumbling words and analogies would have to suffice.

Azula had always had an uncanny ability to understand his nonsense, anyways.

“That’s wishful thinking,” she countered, but her shoulders slowly inched away from her neck. And even when Zuko carefully combed back the uneven ends of her hair and pinned them in place, taking much longer than necessary, she didn’t try to rush him again.

If he’d had a tiny smile on his face, one that had lingered even after he’d finished, no one commented on it.

The breakfast that they took together afterwards was almost civil, and that morning ended as one of the only times they’d had a conversation that hadn’t ended in shouting or flames. And the next morning, Azula called him to her rooms, and they repeated the same process. And again the day after that, and soon it had become almost a routine.

Zuko quickly learned that his sister was most amicable early in the mornings, before she’d sat through endless meetings with Ozai’s former generals and admirals. After around midday, most conversation he tried to make with her inevitably turned back towards the struggles of the war and the military maneuvers they were preventing Azula from carrying out. Her frustration with them only seemed to grow as the days passed, and after one too many dinners that just barely avoided violence, she stopped calling on him later in the day entirely.

He’d felt slightly badly for the relief that it had brought him. As much as he tried to take advantage of every minute that Azula spent with him, their dinners together had rarely proven themselves productive.

The last time that she called on him for dinner occurred several days into their newfound morning routine. It had begun the same way all of their other meals had, though by this point Zuko had regained enough strength in his legs to lower himself to the ground without Ri’s assistance. He spent most of his day convincing Iyemi to go harder on him with her already torturous exercises, and it was paying off, little by little. He couldn’t hold his own weight for very long, but he could hold it, and he hadn’t been able to help the smug look he’d given Azula after taking his first unassisted steps in front of her.

“Well look at you, Zuzu,” she said, raising an eyebrow and waving for the servants to bring them their food. “It’s quite a shame; I would so have enjoyed seeing you crawl around for a while longer.”

“Just like I’m sure you wished my burns had taken longer to heal,” he retorted, but when her fists clenched he softened his tone. “Never mind that, how was your day?”

She leaned forward, gripping her chopsticks a bit tighter than necessary, and began to lay into her advisors and officials for whatever tactics they’d refused her that day.

Zuko had to hold back a sigh.

As far as dealing with her temper, letting Azula vent her frustrations without opposition had been his only success so far. But it had proven difficult to do so when most of her anger had to do with the very war that had brought the two of them to odds in the first place. Zuko always feared that pushing too hard would make his sister defensive or jeopardize their relationship. But at the same time, he had seen with his own eyes just how devastating this war was—both for their people, and for all of the other nations. It was hard to listen to her imperialistic rants when he knew just how righteously feared and hated their nation was.

He had a hard time keeping his opinions to himself, sometimes. It was hardly anything new.

“—so Omashu is proving more difficult to take back than intended, which wouldn’t be an issue if _I_ were the one leading the charge, but the Sages have deemed my reign too _unstable_ to leave the Capital, but now we’re just hemorrhaging troops and supplies, which don’t grow on trees—”

Zuko frowned.

“How many have fallen in the efforts to retake Omashu?” he asked slowly, though he feared he already knew the answer.

Azula sniffed disdainfully at him, taking up a spoonful of soup. “Please, Zuzu, I’m not in the mood for your…humanitarian perspective,” she scoffed.

This was one of the points where they always disagreed, but it was the hardest one for Zuko to ignore. Even against his better judgment, he found himself leaning forward, food completely forgotten as he spoke.

“They are _your_ people, too,” he told her reproachfully. “They deserve more than to be sentenced to death for a battle that might be entirely in vain.”

Azula looked at him, then, not with anger but with something else in her eyes.

“This is war, Zuko,” she said quietly. “Thousands of our people have died, and thousands more will die before it is won.”

His heart was pounding so quickly and violently that it felt as if it were about to crack open his rib cage and spill out onto the table between them. He _never_ understood how she could say things like that so callously. His loyalty was to his people, who had been wronged by the family they had trusted to protect them for almost a century. The weight of every needless death and senseless act of violence—both by and against his people—rested on his shoulders, and his heart _burned_ for every poor soul who had died because of his family’s boundless greed.

Zuko wanted to believe that his sister had the capacity for good, but there was no hope if he couldn’t convince her to unlearn their father’s complete lack of concern for the very people they were supposed to value the most.

“Damn it, Azula!” he snapped, voice raising despite himself. The servants hovering by the door flinched, but Azula did not. “Your duty is to your _nation_ , to your _people_. Thousands of them have _died_ , thousands who did not deserve it. This war has caused unimaginable harm to our nation, and for what?”

“You know what,” she shot back, but the curl of her shoulders was defensive. “It is our duty, as the superior civilization, to bring our light to the rest of the nations. We cannot win this war without sacrifices—”

“Then this war isn’t _worth it!”_ he shouted, and slammed his hand down on the table. “Nothing that causes the amount of loss and pain that this war has caused can be worth it in the end. The other nations don’t even _want_ our civilization, they hate it, and I can see why!”

Azula shot to her feet, and blue flames flickered in her palms.

His heart leapt up into his throat, and his hands twinged with not-yet-forgotten pain, but he stood his ground. His blood was boiling with anger and shame and _hurt_ , and he was so angry he could barely bring himself to breathe properly. Once upon a time, it would have caused his chi to flare out of control. But he had seen the truth of fire, and he had long since learned better than to use his rage to fuel it.

So Azula’s hands shone with fire, and Zuko’s remained empty.

And yet, she did not burn him. Instead, she met his defiant glare with her own, and took an audible breath. And then another, and another, until her flames began to die down. Throughout it all, as the blue disappeared from her palms, she did not break eye contact with him.

“You forget your place,” she said, finally, with barely-restrained anger lacing the edges of her words. “Though I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve been babbling on about the sacredness of every individual little life since you were a child. Trust you to fail to see the bigger picture, both then and now. It’s a weakness that even father wasn’t able to burn or banish out of you.”

Even then, coming up on the third anniversary of the massacre of the 41st, the mention of his failure sent a painful spark of remorse through his chest. He gritted his teeth, trying to push back images of those boys dying, scared and abandoned by their commanders and their Fire Lord, along the Eastern Sea.

“Oh, trust me, I see the bigger picture,” he retorted. “It was cruel of our father to send those recruits to die, when their only crime was to believe in him. I will never regret speaking out against him, because it was the right thing to do. The 41st were _teenagers,_ Azula—”

 _“We’re_ teenagers!” she hissed at him. “We’re younger than they were, and we’re doing our duty to our nation—”

Grimacing, Zuko pushed himself to his feet, leaning his weight heavily upon the table in front of them. Ri took a faltering step towards him, face as pale as a ghost, but stopped when he shook his head subtly. He looked back at his sister, and opened his mouth, but the anger from before had left him, leaving only sorrow in its wake.

Azula was only fourteen, and sometimes it felt like everyone in the world except for him had forgotten that, including herself. The fact that a child had been forced into the position of Fire Lord and was desperately fighting a losing war, clinging to the remnants of their father’s reign, was not impressive.

It was tragic.

“That’s not something to be proud of, ’Zula,” he said tiredly. “Our father was supposed to love his people, and he was supposed to love his children. But he forced us all into fighting his terrible war for him, and it was wrong. I will never forgive him for it.”

“You’re wrong!” she shouted, breath smoking. “Father loved me, he always loved me! I’m not like you, I’m not a failure, I’m not too weak to do what needs to be done!”

Zuko sighed, and looked over towards Ri, who made his way over towards him immediately. He had outstayed his welcome, and he needed to leave before either of them said or did something they would regret.

But…

He turned back towards her, even as Ri wrapped a trembling arm around his waist.

“I love you, Azula,” he said, as gently as he could. She still flinched as if he had struck her. “But our father doesn’t even know what love is.”

Azula stood there, palms now empty of fire, as Ri helped him out of the room. She didn’t speak or try to stop them as they left, just stared after them with wide eyes. When he glanced back in the doorway, one last time, she was still standing there, completely still.

He could’ve almost mistaken her for a statue.

* * *

Zuko was, for the most part, able to stand on his own two feet the entire way back to his rooms. He still needed heavy support to make it that far, and his knees were trembling by the time they reached his doors, but it was one of the first times he hadn’t needed to be picked up while outside of his rooms.

It was enough for him to count it as a victory.

Only when they entered the doors, and Ri helped him onto the bed, did his concentration break enough to notice that the guard was still white as a sheet. When Iyemi came to take over from him, instead of returning to the other guards by the doors, he hovered for a moment. Zuko wasn’t sure if he liked the expression on his face; he was staring at him as if he had just seen a spirit.

“Ri,” he ventured, after a few moments of silence, “are you alright?”

“Is it true, Highness?” he asked faintly.

Zuko leaned forward, as much as he could while seated on the edge of the bed. His brows furrowed with concern. Ri was strict, but also unwavering when it came to his patience. He'd always been a steady, reassuring presence at Zuko’s side. He’d only seen him truly scared during Azula’s worst temper tantrums, and nothing he’d ever seen from him had been quite like this. He seemed more ghost than man.

“Is what true?” he asked, unable to fully hide his confusion.

“I served in the 41st,” Ri blurted, and it struck Zuko like a physical blow to the stomach. “Is it true? What the Fire Lord said?”

He barely even processed the second half of what Ri said, mind too busy racing. He’d—he’d heard, of course, that the 41st Division had been massacred at the Eastern Sea. Uncle had kept the information from him for the first few weeks, when he’d been so feverish his moments of clarity had been few and far in between. He’d only broken the news later, as gently as he could, but it had still been devastating. It had _burned_ to think of the thousands of scared boys who had died screaming, crushed by Earth Kingdom benders.

The pain of knowing he had failed his people had burned worse than any blow his father had dealt him.

Zuko hadn’t cried, because he’d learned at that point that tears only stung his healing skin. Because his father had never liked the rumors that the Crown Prince was a crybaby. But he’d laid awake at night for days and had desperately prayed to Agni for their souls. He’d never dared to hope that any of them had _survived_ —

“You—” he began weakly, and then stopped. “There were _survivors?”_

Ri nodded, and when his gaze slipped over towards Sei there was something haunted in his eyes that not even Zuko could understand.

“A few of us made it out,” he whispered, a confession and an apology all at once. “Most didn’t.”

Sei stepped forward, then, and grasped Ri’s arm firmly. For once, she wasn’t smiling, her face twisted with the kind of sorrow that never faded.

“I had a son, once,” she said, simply.

 _“Oh,”_ Zuko gasped, feeling almost faint. “I didn’t—I’m so sorry.”

He knew he wasn’t making sense, but he was feeling too much all at once to even understand himself at this point. If there had been survivors, they probably would have been sent back out into duty, thrown at the front lines again and again like cannon fodder. And Zuko had been too caught up in honor and the Avatar and his failure to realize that some of the boys were still _left_ , were still at the mercy of his father with no hope for respite or compensation. And Ri was standing there right in front of him and he had been one of those boys, and Sei was with him and she had been one of their _mothers_ —

“Is it true,” Ri repeated, insistently. “That you tried to save us.”

“Of _course_ I tried,” he said incredulously, as soon as Ri’s words registered. “What kind of Crown Prince would I be if I didn’t? How could I just, just _let_ them send my people to die?”

The room had fallen completely silent. Everyone was staring at him, their eyes boring into him with a thousand pleas and a thousand accusations all at once, and he could barely breathe under the weight of it, but the words kept spilling out of him uncontrollably.

“But I couldn’t stop it,” he babbled, “I’m so sorry, I couldn’t make them listen, and, and by the time the fever broke I was already in Earth Kingdom waters and I couldn’t go back, and Uncle said you’d already died, and please what are you doing—”

Ri had fallen to his knees in front of him, expression completely shattered. Zuko reached out desperately to grasp at his shoulders, trying to pull him back up to his feet, why was he kneeling, why was Sei _following suit—_

“Highness,” Sei asked, “why did you fight that Agni Kai?”

Zuko flinched back, heart hammering. Logically, he’d known that the true reason would be obscured from the public, lest his father show his true colors. Along his journeys, he’d heard a thousand different legends speculating about just _why_ the Fire Lord had publicly burned and banished his son. They had typically revolved around some attempt on his part to seize the throne or otherwise discredit his father, and though it still stung, Uncle had helped him turn a blind eye to them.

He’d never bothered to correct them, and had certainly never needed to explain it to someone before. All the important people in his life, like Uncle or Azula, already knew. The last time he’d even voiced it aloud had been during the eclipse, to—

To his father.

“I spoke out of turn during a war council,” he said, the words falling numbly from his tongue. “In defense of the 41st Division. For my disrespect, my father challenged me to an Agni Kai. Now _please,_ rise.”

They stood shakily, but didn’t move away. Ri’s hands trembled, and his eyes were wide as saucers as he stared at him. They flickered away, towards the twisted, marred skin spanning the left half of his face, before returning to meet his eyes.

“You were burned,” Ri whispered. “And you were banished. For us.”

Zuko couldn’t understand why he was looking at him like _that_ , expression so open and almost reverent. He had _failed_ them. He’d spoken out recklessly, had been scarred and exiled for his troubles, and hadn’t been able to change a single Agni forsaken thing.

“I’m sorry it wasn’t enough,” he said thickly, gripping Ri’s shoulders tighter as if he could make him understand the depth of his remorse through the pressure of his fingers alone. When he next spoke, he raised his voice, even as it cracked, to address the entire room. “I’m sorry that my father failed you—all of you—for so long. I’m doing my best to right the wrongs he has done, and I’m not very good at it, but—but I’m trying. I won’t fail you again.”

The others in the room stood there silently, glancing from him to each other and back again. For a long moment, no one moved or spoke.

Then Tozi stepped forward, face lined with fear and determination all at once. To Zuko’s horror, he dropped to his knees, and then bent forward into a full ceremonial bow, with his forehead resting against the floor.

“Please, get up,” Zuko hissed. “What are you—if Azula found out—”

But next to him, Ri and Sei were lowering themselves once more to the floor, following him. As his heart rate spiked and he scrambled forward, praying desperately to Agni that no one would report them to his sister, the servants next to them bowed as well.

Iyemi was the last to bow. Before she did so, she regarded him with a critical look.

“My family’s lives depend on my obedience,” she told him curtly. “But it is possible to serve one and to follow another.”

Then she lowered herself fully, and he was staring with wide eyes at a room full of people who were bowing to _him,_ with his sister on the throne, and his lungs seized so tightly he felt they were about to pop because this was absolutely not what he had intended or wanted. The last thing he wanted were for _more_ people to put themselves in danger for him when he had failed, when there was no doubt in his mind that he was not worth it—

“Please, all of you,” he begged. “Please get up, I don’t want any of you to be hurt. What if she found out? You need to be more careful!”

Agonizingly slowly, the people in his rooms sat up and then raised themselves to their feet. It wasn’t until everyone was standing once more that he breathed out, feeling almost faint. If word of what had just happened ever got to Azula, there was no doubt in his mind that she would burn the entire palace down out of rage.

But they were all standing there, and they all looked terrified but still so, so determined. They were risking their lives for him, risking _treason,_ and yet their eyes were shining with a fierce, unwavering determination. 

“We will be careful,” Sei told him. “But it is our choice who to entrust with our hope.”

Zuko hesitated, and then bowed his head in acquiescence.

“I don’t deserve your loyalty,” he said, clenching his hands into fists. “I’ll do whatever I can to become worthy of it.”

* * *

Things changed fundamentally after that day.

Every one of his interactions with people inside the palace was completely different. He’d already been close with several of his servants and guards—like Ri and Iyemi, for example, or Sei, or even Tozi—but it felt as if a dam had broken with the others. They no longer flinched when he moved or spoke, and didn’t hurry out of the room as if he were about to blast them with flames for lingering too long. Even the other palace staff, from the servants who served him and Azula their meals to the guards who manned the halls, weren’t as skittish around him as they used to be.

The staring, however, was new. He’d known it was bound to happen, but the attention still made him nervous. All of them, with varying degrees of subtlety, stared at him any time they saw him, as if they were trying to size him up. Trying to figure out how many of the rumors were true.

Azula never brought it up, but he was sure that she had to have noticed the change in her staff’s behavior. He was terrified that she would figure out the reason, or that someone loyal to her would tell her. If she decided that Zuko was trying to turn her staff against her, he feared there would be no way for them to repair their relationship.

So when they passed by two of Azula’s servants in the hallway, whispering incredulously about the newest rumor of the disgraced prince and the 41st Division, Ri hid a smile, and Zuko pretended not to hear. And when the servants around him bowed a little lower than his rank called for, he never commented on it.

After that last dinner together, Azula made sure to limit their times together to earlier in the day. He still saw her every morning to do her hair and take breakfast with her, and she would occasionally call on him for tea in the afternoons. For the most part, however, his days were wide open. He spent a good amount of this time getting stronger, and forcing himself through as many exercises as Iyemi would let him, and then some.

Any remaining free time was spent entirely on the Katara problem.

Zuko had tried to think of ways around her bonds, wishing desperately that Sokka were here, because he’d always had a plan for everything, with backup plans to boot—

But that wasn’t productive, because Sokka wasn’t here, and Zuko had to make do on his own.

He couldn’t think of a way to get her out of the Capital City Prison without breaking her bonds somehow. He’d entertained the idea of using water to break her out, but had realized it would be useless if she couldn’t move her hands to bend it. And he couldn’t risk being caught with a flask of water on his way to the prison; it would be impossible to hide without Ri’s help, and even then any one of the prison guards could notice.

There seemed to be no way out of it without melting her chains. And he had to figure out a way to it without burning her, which was the hardest part. If he could heat only the outermost portion of the metal around her hands, while keeping the metal in contact with her skin cool, he could theoretically weaken it enough to break.

The only issue was that he had no idea how to accomplish that.

Firebending was all about creating and manipulating _fire_. It was about the formation of energy and of heat, not the absence of it. Uncle had taught him how to heat his palms enough to warm tea, but as far as he knew no one knew how to cool something down instead of heating it up.

Zuko had asked Sei to swipe him a small collection of metal silverware from the kitchen, though he hadn’t been able to tell her why. He’d been too scared to implicate her, or anyone else, in the escape attempt, and she thankfully hadn’t asked questions. And, over the course of several days, he had begun to hold a spoon or fork in his hands while safely in his rooms, heating the metal and then trying to somehow take that heat away.

He hadn’t expected it to work right away, but as days upon days passed by, precious time where the war was continuing and his people were dying and Katara was in agony, his patience began to slip.

It happened a full week after he’d first gone to visit Katara. A full week of cursing himself and his stupid brain for failure after failure.

All this time, he had been treating heat like an external fire. Uncle had made him spend countless hours raising and lowering the flame of a candle, back during the first few years of his banishment, so it was a familiar exercise. But using his breathing to try to make the heat flare or die down had failed, over and over again.

But on that day, he looked at the glowing end of his metal spoon, and thought to himself that it looked almost like its own little fire. Like _his_ own fire. And anything that was his fire had been put out into the world by him, and it was filled with his own chi.

Conceivably, anything that had _come_ from him could _return_ to him.

So he closed his eyes, focusing not on the sight of the heated metal, but on the imprint of his own chi that he could sense from it. And instead of trying to force that chi down like when dousing a fire, he imagined the faint energy sliding along the handle and down into his hand and returning to his body.

A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead.

When he cracked open an eye, almost too afraid to look, the metal was no longer glowing with heat.

And his fingers were warm.

He stared at them in disbelief, slowly rubbing his thumb and pointer finger together, as that warmth dissipated back up his arm and into his belly. Took a shuddering breath. Then he held flames to the metal for another few moments, until it was glowing red-hot, and sucked the heat away, just as he had before. And again, and again, until his belly was thrumming happily with heat and he was sure that he wasn’t hallucinating.

He felt warmer and stronger than he had in days, and an idea struck him, amidst the rush of adrenaline of knowing he’d _figured it out,_ that all he had to do was get into the prison and he’d be able to actually _help_ —

“Iyemi,” he asked quietly, and she was by his side instantly. He held the spoon a little closer against his side, as if she could somehow see it through the covers. “Is it alright if I bend, just a little?”

Because his bending counted as a drain on his energy, she was technically able to control when he was and was not allowed to use it. It wasn’t very effective, in terms of any bending that she couldn’t see, but it had proven difficult for him to spontaneously produce flames without alarming everyone and drawing Azula’s attention.

But she inclined her head, ever-so-slightly, watching him carefully. So Zuko discreetly let go of the spoon, and drew his hand out into the open. He held it out, palm up, and carefully drew the roiling chi from his belly back down and into his hand, breathing it into life.

A plume of flame shot up from his palm, brighter and hotter and _bigger_ than anything he’d been able to produce in weeks. He blinked at it, not quite surprised, but still impressed. That would be something to explore, later.

If there would even _be_ a later for him, after Katara escaped. It was beyond him, to hope and worry and fear for the consequences of every little domino that would fall once she did. But he knew one thing: Zuko had failed her, and the world, when he had lost to Azula during the Agni Kai.

He wouldn’t fail them again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> on today's menu: zuko accidentally earns the undying loyalty of the fire nation palace staff, and also invents a new firebending (heatbending?) technique, which may just happen to be a surprise tool that will help him later. ;)
> 
> things are coming to a head soon, folks, and we're not even halfway through this story yet, so strap in. sorry for no azula pov this chapter, but that'll be fixed next time!


	6. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> been holding on to this one for a while because next chapter after this is a biggie that i've been struggling with, but didn't want to leave you guys high and dry for too long so here it is!

There were no windows in her cell, no regularity to her meals, that helped her to track the passage of time; but even if they had isolated her from her element, they could not strike the moon from the sky. As it rose and set, so did her very soul. As it waxed and waned, so did she.

There would be a full moon, tonight. For the first time, she would be spending it in captivity.

When Hama had revealed her true colors, what felt like a lifetime ago, Katara had felt disgust and horror, but primarily shock. She had asked herself, that night and nearly every night since, how someone could fill themselves with so much rage and hatred and _pain_.

It had been almost three full weeks of complete dehumanization. Of her body wasting away from hunger and her throat becoming raw with thirst. Of the excruciating pain radiating from her legs and her arms and her hands as she tried, futilely, to break free from the bonds paralyzing her.

She understood, now.

Not fully— _never_ fully—but well enough. Katara would never stoop to the levels of monstrosity that Hama had. She promised herself that, when she could promise herself nothing else. The Fire Nation could take her family, they could take her dignity, they could take her freedom, but they could not warp her sense of right and wrong. She would not let them, no matter how tempting it was becoming to do so.

And so she held on, desperately, to everything that could tear her away from the terrible _emptiness_ she had felt before Zuko’s first visit. She held on to images of Aang, alive because she could not live with herself if he was not; of Sokka, and Toph, and her father, reunited in the Earth Kingdom; and of Zuko, happy and unhurt. When her guards sneered at her helplessness and she felt more object than human, she grabbed on to those memories even tighter.

The prison had upped security an hour ago. Even if she couldn’t bend the guards’ blood, she could still _sense_ them—could still feel the pulsing of blood within four bodies instead of one as they stood outside her cell door. They had only ever done that once before, so Katara wasn’t surprised to see Zuko, but a thrill of adrenaline still rushed down her bowed spine.

All it took was one look at his face and she _knew._

This time, he walked into the room unassisted, but the hope that flared up in her chest at the sight died back down when he plopped ungracefully into the chair, and she saw his knees trembling with the effort. She scrutinized him carefully, searching for evidence of further injuries, but found none. His hands had healed, though she could still recall, with perfect clarity, the bandages that had wrapped across them the last time they had seen each other.

Tui and La would have to hold her back from Azula the next time she saw her, she decided, because she would not restrain herself.

“I figured it out,” he told her, voice low but thrumming with nerves.

Katara thought, briefly, back to the searing pain she had felt during his last visit. She set her jaw and nodded. When he reached around her, movements slightly awkward, she simply closed her eyes and braced herself.

She trusted him fully.

Heat spread slowly through the metal encasing her hands, but it didn’t grow to be unbearable the way it had the last time. Instead, it remained warm, but not painful. Curious, she opened her eyes to ask what he was doing, but she snapped her mouth shut when she saw how his face was slack with concentration. He didn’t need to tell her how dangerous this could be if she distracted him.

For something that she had been frantically praying for throughout the past three weeks, it was over in minutes.

“Stay as still as possible,” Zuko warned, and she felt the metal begin to pull away from her hands.

He warped it just enough to slide it off completely, and then her hands were _free_ , and she could move her fingers in a way that she hadn’t been able to even dream about in weeks. For a single, horrifying moment, she could not remember how to move them again, but then she wiggled them ever-so-slightly. They cramped almost immediately, but the pain was a blessing compared to the entrapment of before.

“Thank you,” she breathed. Her voice was thick, and it wasn’t from disuse.

His face twisted, briefly, and then smoothed out.

“I’m sorry it took so long,” he said. “I figured it out yesterday and asked ’Zula to visit as soon as I could.”

“What did you do?”

“I melted the outer portion of the metal, enough to bend it,” he explained. “And I absorbed the heat in the bottom layer against your skin, so that you didn’t burn, but I could still bend it. But you need to listen, we don’t have a lot of time. You need to break out at night, quietly. The Royal airship is docked halfway across the caldera’s rim, but it’s only guarded by one person. You’ll need to take the guard with you, to man the balloon, and go to Ba Sing Se—”

“You’re coming with me,” she interrupted, brows furrowing with confusion. “Why don’t you power the balloon?”

Zuko was quiet for a moment too long, and the look on his face was almost pitying, but she barged ahead further, refusing to acknowledge it.

“You’re coming with me,” she insisted. “We’ll need your help in taking down your sister and the Fire Nation.”

“I can’t,” he told her, so gently that she hated him for it. “They doubled security for my visit, you won’t stand a chance. And—and I can’t walk very far, or run, and you can’t waste time by trying to heal me.”

He was right, but Katara was nothing if not stubborn, and she shook her head.

“It could be worse,” he said, clearly trying to make her feel better. “Azula won’t kill me. I think my presence in the palace is the only thing keeping her stable right now. Everything’s different with my father gone.”

“You’re being willfully ignorant,” she snapped, refusing to regret his small flinch. “How many times does she have to paralyze you and burn you and strike you with lightning before you understand how twisted she is?”

Zuko raised his chin, eyes flashing. “If I can change, so can she,” he hissed, and then took a deep breath. “Look, I’m not coming with you. I won’t jeopardize your escape, and Aang needs you more than he needs me.”

She was reminded that his stubbornness rivaled hers, at times. It didn’t make her any less furious that he wouldn’t even _try_ to escape with her. Even if there was truth to his words, she wouldn’t admit it. Those kinds of hard truths were the things that people like Sokka dealt with—people who were cool-headed and logical and did what was necessary, even at great personal cost.

Katara loved too fiercely for that. The thought of consigning Zuko to torture at the hands of his own sister, when all he did was sit there and _take it_ and make excuses for her, made her feel sick. In that moment, she hated the war, for the decisions it forced them through. For the divisions it placed between them.

It was unimaginably cruel—for both of them—to expect her to tell him to his face that she had to leave him behind. So she shut her mouth and turned her head away, unable to even look at him.

A tap came at the door, and Zuko waited for a long moment. But she hesitated, and he sighed before pushing himself to his feet and turning to walk away.

“Wait!” she yelled. “I’d better see you again soon, you idiot!”

He turned back to her, eyes wide, and gave her the tiniest of smiles.

“I—I’d like that,” he said, and then flushed. “Seeing you, I mean. Again.”

Then he walked away, and Katara knew with certainty that this was not their last goodbye because she could not comprehend a world in which she would never see his face again.

So she waited. None of the guards dared to come near her—though if they had, they would have been able to see that her hands were free where she had hidden them behind her back. For hours after Zuko left, the four guards outside her door remained. She could dimly sense countless more just down the hall.

But as time passed, and her body begin to sing with the call of the rising moon, the number of guards outside her bars was reduced to just two: one inside the cell door, and one in the hallway.

This was familiar. During the day, it was customary for her to be watched by a single guard; but every night, she was watched by two. She could not think of many praises for Azula, but even she could admit that she knew her enemies well.

She waited until the moon had fully risen to strike.

It was sickeningly easy to call forth her memories of Azula’s fury and snarled words, but she fanned the flames of the twisted hatred and rage in her stomach. A few feet away from her, the guard’s eyes widened, but her vocal cords froze in her throat before she could so much as scream.

Before, when Katara had yet to experience the agony of weeks of torture, or of being told that Aang was dead, her puppeteering would have been jerky, her hold on the guard tenuous. But now, the guard was moving as if she wasn’t possessed at all, gracefully and fully within her thrall with the slightest of flicks from her fingers. The only sign of her helplessness was the fear in her eyes as she unlocked first the barred door and then her chains.

There were arteries along either side of the guard’s throat; a quick pinch of them sent her to the floor, unconscious. Katara was alone, in her cell, and she was free to move for the first time in weeks, free of the weight of her chains. The guard outside her door was none the wiser.

But she had no time to revel in her freedom.

She gingerly pulled her arms in front of her, wincing as they began to cramp, and tried to stand. Her legs refused to obey her. A flare of panic welled up in her throat, but it was beaten down by rage, and a voice in the back of her mind screamed out a _no_ , she would not be stopped here. Not by this.

It was both unfamiliar and painful to force the blood in her own legs to move. She had not felt the agony of bloodbending since the fight with Hama, and the knowledge that she was doing it to _herself,_ when she hadn’t even known that was possible, made bile burn at the back of her mouth. But she forced herself forwards, across the floor to the guard.

Several minutes later, dressed in the colors of the Fire Nation, she pulled herself to her feet and staggered towards the door.

The second guard tried to call for help when he saw her leaning against the doorframe, but she reached out with the strength of the full moon and grabbed him before he could. With gritted teeth, she used his body to grab her arm as if they were comrades, and to help her stand.

It took all of her focus to move them, in unison, down the hallway, but even when they passed other guards no one looked twice at them. They couldn’t see the sweat beading on her brow, and couldn’t hear her heart pounding in her chest. The stairs were much more of an issue—there were far too many of them—and her resolve wavered, but the moon called to her.

Katara pictured Aang’s face, and clenched her fists, pushing herself even harder.

It passed in a blur, adrenaline muddling her perception of time, but everything around her faded away the second they were outside. She stood in fresh air for the first time in weeks, with the moon’s rays on her face, and if tears traced down her cheeks, she and the moon were the only ones to know.

She allowed herself a single precious minute, before they began moving again. As soon as she was out of sight of the prison, she dropped the guard unconscious, and left him behind. With her attention fully diverted to herself, it was much easier to pull her legs along underneath her as she crept along the caldera. She stuck to the very outside of the rim, away from the city and away from any prying eyes.

Failure was not an option.

The sight of the royal war balloon, once she reached it, was unmistakable. She stood there for a moment, taking it in. The design hadn’t changed, even after the one that Zuko and Sokka stole at the Boiling Rock.

The thought of her brother pulled her up short, and her heart _ached_. Then she forced herself onward, shaking her head at herself, because there was a time for all of the emotions swimming around inside of her and that was after.

Whenever after was.

True to Zuko’s word, the airship was guarded by a single woman, who didn’t notice her approaching until it was far too late. Wordlessly, Katara clamped the guard’s mouth shut and pulled them both onto the airship, their movements growing jerky with her exhaustion.

Once they were on board, she sat shakily down against the side. As soon as she released her hold on her own legs, she could feel the drain of energy cease, and she let out a sigh of relief. The guard’s face was white with panic as Katara walked her over towards the engine, and she realized she couldn’t bloodbend her into bending.

She turned the guard’s head, until her eyes met frightened ones.

“The human body is made up of millions of veins,” she said, voice low and dangerous in a way that sickened her own stomach. “I trust you don’t want to experience what it feels like to have them ripped from your skin.”

The guard paled even further, if that were possible. It was an incredibly strange sensation to be able to feel the blood drain from her face.

“But if you do what I say, then I have no reason to hurt you,” she said. “Now take us to Ba Sing Se.”

The guard’s face was grim, and her hands trembled with fear that Katara hated herself for causing. But she let loose a big plume of flame into the engine, jaw set with determination.

Katara closed her eyes and tipped her face up towards the moon’s light as the balloon began to rise, away from the caldera.

Away from the Fire Nation.

* * *

Zuko’s last words to her at their last meal had been burned into Azula’s mind. She’d gone to bed, and had gone about the rest of the next day, as if in a daze. Even at her time with her brother that next morning, their interactions had felt stilted and strange. He’d tried to make conversation, but she’d been quiet, too much on her mind. When he’d timidly asked to visit Katara, she’d said yes.

Then she’d sat through another meeting, where her generals had explained to her how they had been forced into a retreat from Omashu, that it had joined forces with Ba Sing Se to push them out, and had idly wondered if her father had ever loved her.

The same thing that had distracted her during those meetings had compelled her to call on him for dinner, that night. But when he’d arrived, it had become clear that there was something slightly off about Zuko’s demeanor, though she wasn’t sure why. He’d come back from the prison earlier that morning without incident. Now, though, there was a slight tension to his shoulders, and an unreadable look in his eyes. He’d been dejected after visiting Katara the last time, too, so she brushed it off.

Still, the back of her neck tingled.

Zuko was recounting a story of him stealing ostrich horses in the Earth Kingdom, or something banal like that, when she twirled her chopsticks in her hands and carefully asked if he was sure that their father had never loved them.

He quieted instantly, and she kept her gaze firmly on her chopsticks, because the pity that was sure to be on his face was the last thing she wanted to see.

“I spent years trying to deny it,” he told her, sadly. “But father can’t see past himself enough to love someone else.”

Azula let out a short, brittle bark of laughter.

For someone who was typically so oblivious, he’ hit it rather on the head, hadn’t he?

She’d always been able to avoid his wrath, the way Zuko hadn’t, by being better than he was. And yet Ozai was consumed by his ambition, and his greed, in the end. He dubbed himself Phoenix King--would have reduced her to little more than a servant, trapped in the palace, carrying out his will, the title of Fire Lord would have been _meaningless_ if he’d succeeded--and left to carry out the mission that should have been hers in the first place.

Everything he’d ever asked. That, and more, she had given to him. Even back when she’d been five years old, she’d seen the way he reacted to Zuko and to their mother and had taken little scissors and snip-snip-snipped them out of her life. And when she’d seen the satisfaction in his eyes, when she refused to join Zuko’s invitations to play, or rejected her mother’s embraces, she’d told herself it was enough.

But satisfaction was not love.

And he hadn’t even respected her, in the end.

She finally looked up, and she didn’t see pity, but something else. A mixture of things, really. Resignation, and sorrow, and exhaustion. It was a little too much like looking into a mirror, so she looked back down at her food and took a bite.

She couldn’t even taste it.

“But you think you love me,” she said.

“I _know_ I do,” he replied.

She wished, stupidly, that she could believe him. 

But she was too smart for that. She could remember, all too well, how things had changed during his banishment. A little voice in her head had always wondered what would have happened to her, if Zuko hadn’t been there as her foil, to make her shine brighter. If there had been no failure for her to point to every time her progress stalled.

His banishment had given her that answer. A specter of his presence had still remained to loom over her, but distance made it difficult to remember what it had been like to have him home. Ozai had been perfectly content to pretend that Zuko had never existed. His expectations had grown larger and larger, with no signs of slowing or ceasing, and Azula had simply smiled and accelerated her progress. So her flames had grown blue, and she’d mastered lightningbending, and when alone she had pretended that the emptiness of the palace didn’t bother her.

That the silence didn’t bother her.

And when she’d been sent after him, when her father had ordered her to bring him back in chains, well. She’d only really heard _bring him back_.

Zuko had always been easy to manipulate, and it hadn’t even taken that much prodding to turn him over towards her side. And they’d returned _home_ , and for once it hadn’t annoyed her to be side by side with her brother. The time they’d spent together at the palace, or on Ember Island, had been stunted, sure. But it had been civil, and it had been the first time they’d been able to spend any amount of time together at all since before that fateful Agni Kai. For the first time, she’d gone to bed knowing that if she woke up in the middle of the night and padded down the hallway to Zuko’s room, it wouldn’t be empty.

Not that Azula would, but that she _could._

And that had shattered at the eclipse, because—

“You left us,” she said, and paused, because it sounded too accusing, too hurt. But she was too strong for him to hurt her. “I brought you back and we welcomed you and you _left_ as soon as you had the chance.”

Zuko’s mouth thinned in frustration, but only briefly.

“I do love you, ’Zula,” he said, and then he just sounded tired. “But we don’t have the luxury of putting love over our duty to our people.”

Her grip tightened on her chopsticks, and she released them with a clatter onto the table. She’d snapped them, before, and was determined not to do it again, but she was fucking _furious._ He claimed to love her, and at this point, he was the only one who even bothered to pretend to. But what use was his love, if he threw her away the second he thought it benefited their Nation? Wasn’t that exactly what she had done, when she’d spurned him as a child?

Why did it make _her_ a monster, while everyone still loved him?

Father might have never loved anybody, but mother, and uncle, and even Mai— _everyone_ she’d ever wanted had loved Zuko and had left her for it. They’d all turned their backs on their Nation, had committed murder and treason and worse, out of their love for him. And yet the only pathetic love he could offer her in return was secondary. Even after their Nation had burned him and banished him and scorned him, he _still_ valued it over everything, including her.

It was even worse that she knew he didn’t want to.

Not for the first time, she cursed this twisted, scarred world, that expected them to love their people more than they loved their own family, with no regard for how cruel it was to ask that of them.

“I hate you,” she said, and gritted her teeth when it came out too quietly. “I hate you,” she repeated, and then again, as if with enough repetition she could make them both belief it.

“You hate that I left you,” he corrected, though there was no triumph in his voice. “You hate that I would do it again, if it meant our Nation’s survival.”

“I brought you back,” Azula snarled, but she still could not bring herself to look at him. “Father kicked you out but I brought you _home_ and you turned around and left me just like everyone else—”

She stopped, abruptly, when the tablecloth caught on fire. For a moment, they both stared at the blue flames licking at the fabric, before she clenched her hand into a fist and extinguished it. Her anger, as desperately as she tried to hold onto it, died along with her flames.

“It wasn’t your choice when father banished you,” she whispered. “But it was when you left.”

And that was what she couldn’t forgive him for.

“I’m sorry for hurting you, ’Zula,” he told her simply. “And I’m sorry for leaving. I wish I didn’t have to.”

“Me too,” she said.

The honesty was a bit too much for either of them; it rubbed raw against their skin, and furrowed the skin between their brows. Azula resisted the urge to scratch at her arm, curling her fingers against the table. Zuko’s eyes widened, before his face softened into something too bittersweet for her eyes to bear.

The rest of their dinner was silent, consisting mostly of furtive, stolen looks when each thought the other wasn’t watching. She felt like a great bubble between them had burst, leaving behind a sudden space that neither of them really knew how to inhabit. It was painful, and it was uncomfortable, but she couldn’t bring herself to call it _bad_. More like growing pains:

First hurt, and then progress.

The feeling, tender as a freshly-healed wound, lasted even after they parted ways. That night, for once, Azula did not dream.

She woke the next morning to the sound of the prison’s alarm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> azula has so far refused to admit that she cares for zuko, because she is still holding on to her trauma from her father and her fear of loving the person her father never allowed her to love. but it is hard to lie to herself about the hurt that she felt when zuko left during the eclipse, because she knows it wasn't personal but has always had trouble telling her heart that. anything where her emotions refuse to obey her logic is frustrating and terrifying for her. admitting that she wished zuko would stay is a huge vulnerability for her.
> 
> hope you liked the katara pov this time around. also, shit goes MAJORLY down in the next chapter, so be warned ;)


	7. Chapter Seven

Zuko slept fitfully that night, waking in fits and starts at the slightest of noises. Every rustle of the wind and murmured voice from the hallway felt like a shoe beginning its inevitable drop. It was only when countless hours passed without complaint, and when the sky began to lighten outside the windows as he lay staring at the ceiling of his room, he finally allowed himself to believe that maybe, just maybe, Katara had pulled this off.

If she had, she’d be long gone from the Capital by now—the Royal war balloon had been the fastest by far of the Fire Nation fleet, even before it had been decimated by his friends. Now, with only a few smaller war balloons remaining within the Capital, even a few hours’ head start would be more than enough for her to make it to Ba Sing Se unhindered.

It was only once he allowed himself this quiet victory that he allowed his thoughts to turn towards the future, and felt the beginnings of panic settle over him.

“Ri,” he murmured, and if the guard was startled to find out he’d been awake this entire time, he didn’t show it. “I would like to go sit in the gardens, please.”

“Of course, Highness,” Ri said, kindly willing to humor his request despite the clear confusion that painted his tone. “I’ll send for Sei and Tozi straight away.”

He had half a mind to tell him that it was alright; it would hardly matter whether or not he was properly dressed, when Azula found out. But he wanted to grant those around him who had been so kind to him, who had placed their trust in him, whatever last moments of reprieve he could. There was no reason to raise the alarm when no one had yet noticed that Katara was missing.

So he let Tozi carefully arrange gold-trimmed robes around his shoulders, and let Sei comb his hair up into a neat topknot, and tried not to feel like a corpse being prepared for a funeral pyre. When Ri carefully lifted him to his feet, both of the servants followed, and they picked up several more guards on their way down the hallway. It was an ordinary thing, these days—for him to be followed by an entourage of attendants and guards, the way Azula would be if she’d trust those around her a little more. Still, the thought of them seeing what she might do to him made his skin itch.

Later. He’d send them away later.

For now, he’d enjoy his last few moments of certainty and of peace.

He’d only been to the gardens once or twice, when Azula had wanted to take their occasional tea outdoors and the weather had permitted. Even now, after all these years, something in him still ached whenever he saw the blooming bushes that lined the edges, and the tranquil little lake in the center. It was the same part of him that sometimes woke him late at night, with a cry on his lips for a mother who’d left him at age ten and had never come back.

When they emerged into the open, and that familiar ache pressed in on his ribcage, he felt himself breathe easily for the first time in hours. With Ri’s help, he eased himself onto the bench, grounding himself as best he could with the sensation of cool, worn stone under his palms. When he tipped his face back, closing his eyes, Agni’s rays played over his face in a facsimile of a caress.

This might be his last venture outside for a long, long time. He wanted to savor this proximity to Agni, because it was oh-so precious, and he refused to take it for granted. Katara had once told him that her power waxed and waned with the moon; so too did his with the sun. Every day, he felt himself become more and then less as the sun rose and fell, a daily cycle that was as familiar to him as his own heartbeat. Daybreak had always been his very favorite, when he could feel that little spark inside him waking up and swelling as the first rays of the sun peeked over the horizon.

Back on his ship, right after his banishment, even through the pain and the fever, he could distinctly remember that the worst part of it all had been his distance from the sun. Uncle had kept him in bed, fighting off an encroaching infection, and the godawful cabin had lacked any windows. The days he’d spent in there, absent of time and of Agni, had been enough to almost drive him mad.

He wondered how quickly his senses would leave him, if Azula locked him underground.

A slight noise pulled him from his thoughts, and he slowly peeled his eyes open, glancing in its direction. When he found its source, a small smile tugged at his lips.

The turtleducks were out on the lake again. There seemed to be one or two more than there had been the last time he’d been out here; though their current numbers still couldn’t hold a candle to his memories from when his mother had still been around. They were floating together in a little flock, lazing about on the lake’s otherwise flawless surface.

As he idly wished he’d brought some seeds to feed them, the prison bells began to ring.

Though his heart sped up slightly in his chest, none of his earlier tension returned to him. Back when the day of the eclipse had dawned, as he’d waited to finally confront his father, possibly walking into his own death, he’d been a sweaty and panicked mess. Right now, he felt strangely calm, a bit as if he were surrounded by cool water, such that the outside world could only filter through to him in bits and pieces.

Ri had, predictably, rushed over to him, and was speaking to him in a low and urgent tone. He’d be wanting to take Zuko back to the safety of his rooms, to protect him.

But Zuko didn’t want this to happen there. The Palace was flammable, after all. He’d always preferred the outdoors, anyways.

“I’d like to stay here,” he said, and though his voice was soft there was an undertone to it that made everyone fall silent around him. “You should all go back inside, for a little while.”

Ri laid a hand on his arm, speaking slowly to him, as if dealing with a panicked child. “Those bells mean that a prisoner’s escaped. You can’t be alone right now.”

“I know. I won’t be alone for very long,” Zuko said simply. He dragged his gaze back to the lake, and let his eyes trail lazily over the turtleducks’ bobbing heads. “My sister will be here shortly, I’m sure.”

“What did you do?”

Zuko glanced back up, and saw Tozi standing in front of him, eyes wide.

“Highness?” questioned Sei, when he didn’t immediately answer. “What did you do?”

He sighed, and wished that the bells could’ve rang just a few minutes later, to let him have his peace for just a little while longer.

“I did what I had to do, for this Nation and for the world,” he said wearily, feeling much older than his sixteen years, though it was hardly for the first time. “I don’t regret it, and I’ll face whatever consequences my actions have. Now all of you need to get inside, because Azula’s not going to be happy.”

Around him, everyone’s faces had gone white with terror. He knew they were putting the pieces together, between his recent visit to Katara and the fact that she was the only prisoner worth sending up an alarm form. He knew Azula would only need seconds to realize he was behind this, which meant she was likely already on her way. They were running out of time.

Ri’s face, still tight with fear, hardened. “Highness, I’m not leaving you—” he started.

“That’s an order,” he interrupted firmly, hands tightening against the stone bench. “I’m going to need you all after—afterwards,” he added, to soften the blow.

He knew he was being harsh, but he wasn’t going to let his sister cause them or their families pain and heartbreak just because he’d been too cowardly to do the right thing and send them away.

“But—” Tozi began desperately, before a noise sounded and he fell silent.

Zuko heard Azula before he saw her—the crackling of smoke, her light, rapid footsteps, and the clanking of her guards as they trailed behind her. She’d always been too much for everyone around her; too fast, too strong, too smart, such that they were never quite able to keep up.

There were very few times in Zuko’s life when he’d managed to pull one over on her. The most recent time had been his escape during the last eclipse. It had brought him no joy, then, just as he felt no joy now.

As soon as she rounded the corner, in all her blazing fury, Azula screamed.

“What have you _done?”_ she shrieked at him, and in a heartbeat she was directly in front of him, her nails digging into his shoulders. He could feel the heat of her palms through the fabric covering his skin, and yet there were no flames. “What the _fuck_ have you _done?!”_

“Katara will make it to Ba Sing Se before you can ever catch up to her,” he told her, hoping to get the worst of it over with. Even now, as she snarled in his face, he was having flashbacks to their recent Agni Kai. This conflict between them was no less tragic now that it had been those weeks ago.

If Azula could hear the sorrow in his voice, she chose to ignore it. She let out a wordless scream, and shook him by the shoulders, until he felt his teeth clack together sharply.

“If she gets to the Avatar, do you know what will happen to the war? To _us?”_ Azula spat.

Zuko didn’t dare reach up to wipe away the fleck of spit that had landed on his cheek.

“The world needs the Avatar,” was all that he said. “If that means we will lose the war, then that’s what is meant to happen.”

Azula’s face screwed up, and for a brief, horrifying moment, she looked as if she were about to cry. Then she released him, suddenly, and spun around. One moment the lake was there, as undisturbed by the ruckus as ever. The next, an entire side of it had been melted away, and only the charred remnants of the tree that he used to sit with his mother underneath remained. Zuko watched smoke rise from the tree stump, and numbly realized that the smoking wreckage could have been _him_ , if Azula hadn’t turned away when she had.

“I saved your _life!”_ she screamed brokenly, turning back to face him. In the early sun, her eyes almost seemed to flash with gold. “I had my healer nurse you back to health, I kept that waterbender _alive_ , I let you visit her—and _this_ is how you repay me?”

He’d known that she’d see this as a betrayal. Everything had to be in terms of black and white with Azula—either you agreed with her, or you were her enemy. Their father had never left room for disagreements and respect to coexist with each other, so why would she? It was impossible for her to accept the idea that he loved her, but could not support her in this war.

“Azula—” he tried, but she cut him off.

“Were you laughing at me, all those times we dined together?” she hissed. “All those times you did my hair, like we were children again? Were you just biding your time, waiting to unleash the Avatar on me?”

A pang went through him at the implication that he’d been playing a game the entire time, and he shook his head desperately. She should know better. He didn’t have it in him, neither intellectually nor morally, to do that to someone; he felt sick at just the thought of it.

“No! Aang gave me a second chance, even when I least deserved it,” Zuko said desperately. “He’ll give you one, too, I promise. All you have to do is take it.”

He wasn’t saying anything that he didn’t truly, deeply believe, and he hoped she’d recognize that. He’d grown up believing that things like trust, and second chances, were things of weakness. But everything he knew of Aang’s journey had taught him that faith in people’s ability to do good, even after they’d performed acts of unspeakable evil, was one of the strongest things a person could have. Aang had been desperate to give his _father_ —a man tied to the genocide of Aang’s entire people—a second chance, even in the face of everyone telling him death was the only way. He’d bent the very laws of bending itself, just to spare Zuko’s father his life.

Couldn’t Azula see that?

“And what must I do for that chance? Give up my throne? Give up the war?” she demanded. “Your Avatar doesn’t want to redeem me, he wants to strip away everything that makes me who I am!”

“Why is that?” Zuko yelled, giving in to his frustration and surging up onto his feet. “I am still Zuko, even without my people, and even without a throne. Father never let you be _yourself_ , never let you dare to dream of anything that he hadn’t already set out for you. Isn’t it enough to just be Azula?”

Something snapped in Azula’s expression.

_“I DON’T KNOW WHO THAT IS!”_ she screamed, and a plume of blue fire whipped out towards him.

He reacted without even thinking, even as his heart broke in his chest for his baby sister. He reached out with his chi until he could feel the very flames and then _snuffed_ them out, the blue fizzling into nothingness before it could even near him. The wash of heat as it clung to his body took his breath away—Azula’s flames were many times hotter than his own.

“What was that?” Azula yelled, face contorting with fury. “How did you _do_ that, _stop_ it—”

The next round of fire was larger, so expansive as it swept towards him that it almost reminded him of their Agni Kai. Azula’s grip was slipping even more—this time the flames threatened Ri, and the others, who had fallen back behind him but had stubbornly refused to flee inside, even when faced with the sight of their Fire Lord’s firepower. Maybe it was a mistake to push her when she was already so angry, Zuko thought to himself, heart racing and belly all but boiling with heat as he quieted down his sister’s fire.

“Azula, please listen to me,” he pleaded. A beat of sweat dripped down his temple, and the heat within him had grown so large he was struggling to remain upright. “I didn’t do this to hurt you. I _love_ you!”

“Shut up, shut up, shut _up,”_ she screeched, and her furious gaze flicked over to the guards. “Guards! Seize the traitor!”

A beat of silence followed her words.

And another.

Tozi—young, sweet, _stupid_ Tozi—was the first to move. Slowly, fists trembling but face set, he stepped forward to stand between them.

“Your Majesty, I can’t let you hurt Prince Zuko,” he said shakily.

Azula’s eyes just about popped out of her head. “Why you—” she began, lunging forward. Zuko’s heart leapt into his throat, and he reached out without even knowing what he was planning on doing, full of the certainty that he couldn’t let her hurt anyone. Ri beat him to it, and stepped up to stand at Tozi’s side, dropping into a classic firebending kata.

“Your Majesty, you will regret hurting your brother once you calm down,” he said firmly. Behind him, several of Azula’s own guard marched forward and mirrored his position.

Zuko’s eyes were wide with horror, and his hands trembled where he’d clenched them into fists at his sides. “Please,” he said weakly. “Please, don’t, please just stand down—”

Azula’s hands went slack. _“You,”_ she whispered, and Zuko’s eyes flicked up from the guards to see that she was glaring right at him, smoke curling from her hands and her clothes and even from between her lips.

He reached out to her, wordless in the face of the sheer hatred and hurt in her eyes, wishing desperately that he could take all of her pain away and ruing that he was the cause of it.

“It’s always you,” she seethed, so quiet in comparison to her earlier fury that it chilled Zuko’s blood in his veins. “Every time. Mother, Uncle, even Mai, now _them_ —”

“Azula,” he said quietly, shocked, but she shook her head.

“ _Every time_ , they choose you,” she insisted, and flames flickered at the ends of her tongue. “I told you they would betray me, I _told_ you—and you don’t even have to _try,_ they just always fall at your feet, and why?”

“Azula,” he tried again.

_“WHY?”_ she screamed, and this time when the flames came he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop them.

“Please!” he cried, scrambling forward, pushing through the startled guards. His heart fluttered in his chest like a frightened little sparrow, but Azula’s flames died down as she stared at him. Her emotions warred with each other on her face so openly he could hardly believe this was his sister. Chief among them was pain, and loneliness, and he _ached_ for the times when they were younger, when she would let him comfort her. There was too much distance between them, now; their father’s influence had seized her away for years.

He was betting everything, even his life, on the fact that Azula would be able to come back to him, eventually.

“What?” she spat.

“I know you’ve been alone for a long time,” he said desperately. “I know that one person after another in your life has left you, and I know that I’ve left you, too. But I’m right here, and I’m not in a war balloon on my way to Ba Sing Se, I’m right here with _you_. Azula, I love you, and I’m choosing you, right now.”

She took a step towards him, then. And another. He waited for her, nerves trembling in anticipation, arms outstretched. She was almost within reach, if he could just stretch his fingers far enough, he’d be able to finally, _finally_ close the distance between them—

“But don’t you understand, Zuko?” she crooned.

He heard his father’s words spilling from her tongue, and his knees gave out underneath him because he _knew_ that he’d lost her.

Now Azula was practically on top of him, looming above him even as he craned his head back to look at her, hoping desperately to see even a shadow of something familiar in her eyes and finding nothing at all, neither fear nor rage nor pain.

She reached out to take his face in her hands. Her palm was warm and dry where it hovered right above the skin of his right cheek. He didn’t have enough sensation in his scar to feel the other side.

Ever since—ever since father, he’d never quite been able to tolerate anyone coming near his face. Even now, _especially_ now, his breath hitched right along with his heart. He tried to speak, but his voice failed him. All he could do was mouth a wretched ‘please.’

“No one loves a monster,” Azula breathed, and wreathed her hand in flames.

“No, no, no _please_ —” he gasped, trying to wrench away from the fire as his heart spurred into overdrive. Her other hand fisted into his hair, holding him in place just like h—

“Shut up,” Azula gritted, but he was beyond panic now, beyond hearing her. The heat from her hand stung the delicate skin of his cheek. It would sting and then it would burn and then it would sear and then it would _melt_ all while he _screamed_ —

“Please, _father—”_ he begged, and then his heart stopped, and he collapsed like a ragdoll cut free from its strings.

* * *

As soon as the word _father_ fell from her brother’s lips, the flames in Azula’s hand died away as sharply as if she had been doused with an ocean’s worth of water. The heady rush of raging fury that had swelled within her, drowning out all thoughts save for the frantic pounding of her own pulse, dropped away, and she staggered back in horror. For a moment, as she looked down, she saw the specter of the brother from her dreams, with a scorched skull cracked open and seared brain matter leaking onto the grass. She blinked, and lying in place of the body was Zuko’s pale face. The skin on his healthy side was tinged pink, not even burned, but somehow she could still smell the scent of charred flesh, so strongly she could almost _taste_ the ashes on her tongue.

Then she was falling to her knees, shaking hands reaching out for her big brother, finding their way to his face and to his throat. She mouthed his name, but her throat was as dry as if she’d been kept from water for weeks, and no sound fell from her lips.

He didn’t have a pulse.

Zuko didn’t have a pulse, and Azula’s world was falling down around her, because she had never existed in a world without Zuko in it. All the times that he had left her, and all the times that she had been alone, had cursed his name from within a too-large palace—all those years, and she’d never been more alone than she was right now, with her brother’s heart cold and dead under her fingers. All the times she’d sworn she hated him for leaving, and she was the one who’d pushed him where she couldn’t follow.

“Healer,” she croaked.

The commotion of the guards around her was barely on her radar, how could she have paid attention to it when she could barely feel her own fingers and toes, but even then she noticed when they fell silent.

“Healer,” she gasped, louder this time, lips curling into a desperate snarl. _“Get me a healer!”_

Several of the people around her peeled, off, but the knot inside her stomach only curled itself tighter because she knew that there was nothing the healer would be able to do about a stopped heart. She curled herself over her brother’s body, arms trembling so violently she could barely keep herself upright, and pressed her forehead to his for the briefest of moments.

Her cheek felt cold in the absence of the warm puffs of breath she knew should be coming from Zuko’s mouth.

“I can do this,” she murmured, to herself, to Agni, to anyone who was listening, and pulled back. Her fingers shook as she dug them into the bones of Zuko’s ribcage, numbly recalling every bit of knowledge she had about the human body. She found his lowest rib and counted up, up, until she dug the first two fingers of her right hand into the space directly above his heart.

Azula pressed the heel of her palm flat against the space between her big brother’s ribs, and focused. Usually, she had to concentrate on the searing loneliness that had coursed through her in the wake of her mother’s and brother’s disappearances from her lives. But this time, it was all-too easy to take the sickening _emptiness_ inside her and compress it into a festering, living thing, crackling with energy.

_“Live_ , you idiot,” she breathed, and punched lightning into her brother’s heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was originally going to keep the azula pov for the next chapter and leave you on the cliffhanger right after zuko's heart stopped, but you can consider this your reward for having to wait like half a year for this update haha


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